


A Dress with Pockets

by PacificRimbaud



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Chickens, Comedy, Communication during sex, F/M, Fashion Designer Pansy Parkinson, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Fluff and Smut, Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, Herbologist Neville Longbottom, Herbology, I Will Go Down With This Ship, Japan, Light Angst, Love Confessions, Mentions of Hello Kitty, One Night Stands, Rainforests, Rare Pairings, Romantic Comedy, Smut, Tokyo (City), Travel, Weddings, catching feelings, rolled sleeves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-20
Updated: 2019-11-11
Packaged: 2020-12-27 00:50:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 25,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21109976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PacificRimbaud/pseuds/PacificRimbaud
Summary: Pansy Parkinson needed a drink.And a shag.She didn't care in which order.Enter: NevillefuckingLongbottom and his rolled up sleeves.Set in LovesBitca8's Rights and Wrongs AU.





	1. A Dress with Pockets

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Right Thing To Do](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11472648) by [LovesBitca8](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LovesBitca8/pseuds/LovesBitca8). 

Pansy Parkinson watched as Hermione Granger, Golden Girl, Brightest Witch of Her Age, Modern Business Witch, Swottiest Swot That Ever Swotted, flowed down a wide staircase wearing a gold silk gown, closely fitted from the bust through the hips, floor-length skirt bundled up in one hand. The gown had Desrosiers written all over it, timeless and expensively tasteful, draped _just so_, and exactly nothing like what Pansy would have put her in for the occasion. At the bottom of the stairs, Draco stood looking up at Granger with the wide, glistening eyes of a besotted carp.

Pansy tossed her copy of the _ Daily Prophet _ into the bin discreetly tucked beside the downy expanse of her freshly made bed.

She’d be _ damned _ if the wedding dress wasn’t Parkinson.

Pulling first at one earring and then the next, she dropped them into a jewelry dish sitting on the top of the bureau, drew her heels off and chucked them into the corner next to a patinaed Savonarola chair. Her dress, the simple but beautifully constructed black shift she wore often when she was working, was slung over the back of the chair, and she threw herself after it, clad in nothing but her very expensive underclothes, to drape her limbs loosely in exhaustion over the wooden sides of the chair. She pressed a hand firmly to her eyes through a long exhale.

It had been a long day: fittings with two Wizarding celebrity clients, meetings with suppliers, an elegant, lingering lunch in a private dining room with a very famous female designer who had graciously agreed to mentor her, and endless hours in her new Milan showroom, fussing over details that she would have to learn to delegate, ensuring everything was up to her standards, and confirming that the deputies running the Italian side of the business had everything they needed to do their jobs just as well as she would herself.

Exhausting. Fulfilling, but _ exhausting_.

And now, everything short of a personal Floo confirmation indicated that Draco Malfoy had finally slid into Hermione Granger’s starched white knickers.

She was glad for him, truly, even after everything she’d put up with from that platinum blonde idiot over the last few years, but he didn’t owe her the wedding dress commission; he owed her the clothes for the whole bloody wedding party.

She tilted her head back and sighed deeply again.

She needed a drink.

And a shag.

She didn’t care in which order. 

* * *

Gripping her wand, and now wearing a plunging wrap dress that showed off the long lines of her elegant frame with a pair of delicious heels that she’d almost decided against packing, she Apparated across town to a spot just outside of a large hotel.

It was one of those bustling little corners of the world where the Magical and Muggle collided, everyone mingling together as unaware as the passengers coming and going at King’s Cross station. It was also a place that she understood to be _ nice_, in the way that the bourgeois always declared and wanted things to be _ nice_, with _ nice _ rooms, a _ nice _ restaurant, and a very _ nice _ pool, but one that also had a surprisingly chic little bar, often full of young men who she trusted would not be as _ nice _ as all that.

She stashed her wand in the depths of one of the spacious magical pockets she included at the side seams of even her most body-conscious dresses, and walked in the way she’d been brought up to (_she _ wouldn’t need to play catch-up like a soot-smirched foundling in a Victorian ladies’ novel, for Merlin’s sake what were any of them thinking) through the dimly lit room to take a seat at the bar.

“I’d like a martini, dry, straight up,” she told the bartender. She’d feigned a preference for Muggle liquor in her teens purely to annoy her mother, but in the course of doubling down on the gambit had found that Muggles really did know how to do some things better than the Wizarding community, and getting themselves drunk in style was one of them.

Drink in hand, she swiveled slightly on her stool and gazed with a cultivated lack of interest around the bar.

Men there were, in spades, many in Muggle business suits, but plenty with the telltale flourishes of Wizarding menswear.

_ Gods _ she was tired of men.

Drinks first, then.

She swigged her martini in a way that she also knew from her drinking experiments drove her mother up the tapestries, and tapped one short, manicured fingernail against the side of her glass while giving the bartender a loose, flirtatious smile. One down, time for another.

The first man in the room to bite was a brunette with soft-looking skin the color of strong tea with just a splash of milk, and a smirk that she wanted to wipe off his face with the red-soled ball of her high-heeled foot. Would she like another drink? He liked her accent. He wanted to know what she was doing in Milan. His hand was on her knee. And that _ smirk_.

Insufferable.

She pulled him off her hook and threw him back into the sea with a withering glance.

“Not interested,” she told him, flatly, peeling his fingers off her skin and muttering a wandless spell that made him cough lightly on his own saliva before he could say anything more.

Men. Boys, really, most of these, and maybe the ones with greying hair and fantasies of being some bright young thing’s Daddy were boys, too, chasing their own misspent youth or a fantasy they formed during some critical moment of puberty.

She drained her second martini, wrapped her lips around the smooth green skin of the olive and bit down with a sigh.

The couple sitting at the bar to her left vacated their stools, and as the movement pulled Pansy’s eyes in their direction, her attention fell on a figure hunched over further down the bar.

He was broad-shouldered and tall- even sitting he was clearly tall enough to have developed the atrocious posture of people who wish to shrink themselves to better fit the world- almost luminously pale, lightly freckled, and with a mop of loose, dark curls. His suit was simple, but clearly of Wizarding make, and he nursed a glass of beer so dark no light could escape it.

A boy, this one, certainly, but something about his height or his strangely sweet hunched shoulders made her belly roll in curiosity.

She turned her attention firmly away from him and sucked lazily at the olive in her third martini.

It was less than five minutes before her peripheral vision caught him standing to take the few steps toward her. She braced herself for the come-on, hoping it was enough to get him into her knickers, but she was not prepared, not at all, when he said-

“Heya, Pansy.”

She rotated on her stool to face him.

Bloody. Fucking. Hell.

It was Neville _ fucking _ Longbottom, that useless sop who hadn’t done anything right in his entire closeted Hufflepuff of a life until he miraculously grew a pair in 7th year.

She hadn’t seen him since she left Hogwarts, and he had gone and become fuckable.

Not even slightly fuckable, no: Clearly. Eminently. _ Unanimously_.

He was tall, _ Merlin _ what did they put in the water over in the greenhouses, and very lean but muscular, like the Muggle footballers Pansy secretly appreciated. He had grown into that _ absurd _ mouth of his (apparently he just needed a few more centimeters of jaw), had obviously undergone some magical work on his teeth, and Gods, his _ eyes_, had they always been like that? Why the Harry Potter ocular obsession when there was a pair of deep hazel wells like these knocking about in Gryffindor Tower?

“Longbottom,” she answered, not needing to feign surprise.

“Do you mind if I sit?” he asked, nodding to the stool next to her.

“Of course not,” she answered in her most well-bred drawl, shifting her knees toward him as he folded himself into the seat beside her.

“Funny seeing you here,” he chirped awkwardly, sloshing a puddle of stout onto the bar as he caught the edge of the coaster with the bottom of his pint glass.

And like a magic trick, there he was: the Neville Longbottom she'd just been briefly convinced the world had lost forever to the inevitability of physical maturation.

“Indeed,” she shot back, smirking a smirk she thought had been left behind her at Hogwarts along with the weird, shabby-looking Neville who was overfond of anything that had to do with dirt. Only now the smirk was less _ mean_, and more, she was more shocked than anyone to realize, _ interested_.

“What brings you to _ Milano_?” she asked, plucking at a cocktail napkin.

_ Milano_? Had she gone insane?

“I’m here for a conference,” he said. “It’s being held at the hotel, I just came down for a beer before I turn in for the night.”

“Ah,” she answered. _ Don’t ask what sort_, she told herself, and then immediately, “What sort of conference?”

“It’s on magico-organic herbology,” he smiled. “The Italians are really at the forefront of the magical soil restoration movement, you know.”

Longbottom _was_, apparently, still playing in the dirt.

She nodded and put her lips to her martini, not as curious as maybe she ought to have been about whatever plant-based movement the Italians were leading.

“What brings _ you _ here?” he returned, sipping at his black brew and then licking away a mustache of cream-colored foam.

“Work,” she said. “I’m a fashion designer, and this,” she gestured broadly, “is one of the places I need to be.”

Longbottom leaned slightly back and for a moment looked like he was performing some mental Arithmancy. She watched in real time as his synapses fired.

“Hermione’s been wearing your clothes, right?” he asked.

Gods. Even Italy wasn’t far enough to get away from the subject of Golden Girl Granger for two minutes altogether. She may be the making of Parkinson as a fashion designer, but it came at a steep cost to her personal pride.

“Yes, she is. How did you know?”

“I saw the photos in the _ Daily Prophet_. Really lovely, if I remember. You should be very proud.”

Pansy arched one of her impeccably shaped brows and smiled. “She _ is _ very beautiful, isn’t she.”

Longbottom looked perplexed for reasons Pansy couldn’t fathom. “Oh, Hermione? Well, I suppose.” He laughed uncomfortably. “I meant your clothes, really, they’re quite nice. I think they’d suit any witch.”

Pansy looked at Longbottom like he’d sprouted a second, also alarmingly handsome head.

“You don’t find Granger attractive?” she asked, disbelieving.

“Oh, no, I mean…” Longbottom looked nervous. “She’s like a sister to me, isn’t she?” He looked at Pansy furtively over the rim of his glass and finished the last swallow of his beer. “And not to offend anyone, but she’s not really my type.”

Pansy laughed openly. Not Longbottom’s _ type_. What was Neville Longbottom’s _type_, exactly? Professor Sprout?

Longbottom laughed nervously, not really following. “Am I supposed to be attracted to her?”

“Not at all, Longbottom, but I’m beginning to think you’re in a shrinking minority.” Pansy tilted her head to one side, considering him. “Are you seeing anyone?”

He signaled for another beer. 

“No. I don’t really want anything serious right now,” he answered, turning more fully toward her. He paused for a long moment, chewing gently on his bottom lip. “I’m honestly not sure why everyone from our year seems to be in such a rush to pair off and mate for life,” he continued, blushing slightly. “I’m still young, you know?”

Pansy ran a finger around the rim of her martini glass.

“It’s the war,” she said. “Isn’t that a thing? A war happens, a bunch of people die, then afterward there’s a great big rush to procreate, shore up the population?”

“Yeah, that makes sense,” he replied. “But, I guess, in spite of everything, I feel like we have lots of time. Killing Voldemort felt...freeing. Like the world is open to us for the first time. And my job is fantastic. I get to do what I love, make a real difference in how the Wizarding world interacts with nature, and travel all over the world. I’m headed to Japan next month.”

“That’s wonderful,” she answered, genuinely.

“I’m not saying I’m not interested in seeing people. I am. But casually, I think.”

Pansy’s finger stopped moving around her glass.

“How casually?” she asked, raising her eyebrows.

He blushed furiously.

Pansy looked around the bar at the polished young Italian women, the tourists, the men in suits, and made a decision.

Neville Longbottom left Hogwarts and...grew up. Neville Longbottom had a passion for work and travel. Neville Longbottom wasn’t looking for a wife. And Neville Longbottom didn’t understand what the great big _bloody_ deal was about lovely, perfect Hermione _ bloody _ Granger.

“Would you like to ask me to come up to your room?” she said.

Longbottom choked on a mouthful of stout.

He looked at her unsteadily for a long moment as he coughed and wiped at his shirt front. Then, seeming to have come to a conclusion, he turned away from her, took another long draught of his beer, tossed a few bills on the bar, and stood.

He cleared his throat, then asked in a thin voice, “Pansy, would you like to come up to my room?”

“Let me settle my tab,” she replied.

* * *

She was on him the moment the door to his room clicked shut.

His mouth, that ridiculous, overgrown, completely _ absurd _ Longbottom mouth she’d hated so much at school, was reforming her. Rehabilitating her. Remaking her into something penitant and willing to change.

His mouth was at her mouth, and she was sorry, so _ very _ sorry, that she had ever thought or said or done anything against it, this perfect, hungry mouth that Longbottom had, which was soft and hard all at once and licking into her like she was an ice cream cone dripping into his hand on a hot summer’s day.

Neville Longbottom could _ kiss_.

Who taught Neville _ bleeding _ Longbottom to kiss?

Pansy was suddenly, irrationally, outraged that it hadn’t been her.

She nipped his bottom lip, hard, and he groaned.

She had kicked off her heels at some point and stood on the balls of her feet, reaching up to that mouth with her own while he stooped down to meet her, and she was thinking about...his hands. His hands were at her backside. They were large. So large. Why hadn’t she noticed that before? He was tall, so the hands made sense. They were large, and grabbing firmly at her ass, covering all of her and pulling, pulling up and into his tall, lean body.

And then those large hands were questing, slipping beneath the fabric of her knickers to grasp at the skin of her backside.

She wanted her fair share of skin, too.

Running her hands around the waist of his slacks, she pulled his shirttails free of his trousers and pushed her hands up to slide across the skin of his back.

_ Closer_, she thought, urging him into her, and without taking his hands off her ass or his tongue out of her mouth, he began to walk them, her going backward, him forward, like an awkward tangled backward-forward kissing clutching slow-motion three-legged race, up to the edge of the hotel bed, where she pulled her hands from his back and unbuckled his belt, unzipped his trousers and jammed one hand down the front of his pants to dig around until she found what she wanted.

She did, and it was...startling.

She broke her mouth from his for the first time since they’d entered his room, and looked down at where her hand disappeared into his pants.

“What the _ fuck _ is this?”

Longbottom stared at her like a badger caught in the high beams of an oncoming lorry.

“It’s my…”

“I know it’s your _ cock_,” she practically shouted, “but you’re _ Longbottom_.” She looked between him and where her hand gripped him like he ought to know what she meant. He didn’t.

“_Neville. Longbottom_,” she clarified.

“Yes?” he confirmed.

_ I watched you pour maple syrup straight down your shirt front in third year_, she thought. _ The whole cup of it, just straight down the shirt and tie. _

She pulled close to him and pressed tiny flicks of her tongue in a line from his collar bone to his chin by way of explanation.

_ What right do you have to just go walking around like _ this_? And being _ tall_? And your _ mouth_, Neville. Have you thought about _ that_? _

Her mind was getting off topic, and returned to the subject at hand.

“What am I supposed to _ do _ with this?”

“Oh. Um, well, you could…”

“_Don’t _ tell me what to do with a cock, Longbottom.”

She latched her mouth to his again, stroking him firmly with one hand, and with the other wrestling with the buttons on his shirt.

She was going to lick him, everywhere. It was the only solution. Just absolutely _ everywhere_.

Longbottom pulled his hands from her ass and began sliding them around her dress, searching for whatever buttons or zip or ties held it closed, and his travels brought his fingers across the outside of her thigh.

“What’s _ this_?” he asked around her tongue, his hand stopping over her hip.

“That’s my wand,” she answered, finishing off the third button down and aggressively approaching the fourth.

He leaned away from her, taking in the lines of her dress lying smooth against her frame.

“_How _?”

“It has pockets,” she supplied. “Honestly I don’t know what’s taken the Wizarding community this long to put decent-sized pockets in women’s garments. It’s the _ simplest _ bit of magic, absolutely _nothing_ at all. It’s like no one cares about the day to day needs of real women, Longbottom.”

“_I _ care about women,” he said earnestly, taking over with the buttons and removing his shirt before continuing to search around the perimeter of her dress for the access codes.

“Of _ course _ you would,” she hissed at him, reaching down and rolling his balls in her palm.

His eyes rolled back in his dumb, beautiful head. 

A moment later, he came back around and peered futilely down the front of her dress. "How does it open?"

“It wraps, at the side—no, the other side—like a present. Just like a present. Pull. Just pull on the—_there_.”

It came off neatly, and then her bra clasp only took three passes.

“_Gods _, you’re beautiful,” he breathed into her skin before he swept most of her small breast into his mouth.

She had nothing to say to that, so she squeezed him, hard.

“_Fuck_. What do you want?” he whispered close to her ear

“Longbottom, I’ve had your truly impressive- one might honestly say _ intimidating _ \- cock in my hand for five minutes, what do you _ think _ I want?”

“How do you want it?”

Well. _ That _ was a new question.

“I haven’t looked at the menu,” she answered, urging his trousers and pants down his legs. “What are my options?”

“Do you like it slow, fast, lots of touching, less touching…”

“Merlin, Longbottom, just _ fuck me how you like to fuck_,” she growled at him.

With that, he yanked her knickers down her legs, then hopped around in a short circle while he pulled his trousers and pants over his heels.

“Socks _ off _,” Pansy commanded.

“Of course,” he responded, incredulous. "Who leaves their socks on for..."

Before he could finish the thought, she bowled him over onto the bed.

Mouthing at her neck, he rolled onto his back, then pulled her to sit over his hips.

“This is your first move?” she laughed.

“I want you to come straight away,” he said, smiling in a way that had Pansy thinking maybe she didn’t give people who like dirt enough credit. “Before anything else happens.”

“I’ll do my best,” she said, then lined him up and began to take him in.

She was ready. Merlin, she was _ more _ than ready, almost shamefully ready had she been capable of feeling embarrassed by her own arousal.

Still, it was...a lot. She went excruciatingly slow, letting herself adjust. His face as she took him in a centimeter at a time- strikingly like a small child watching fireworks for the first time- was an image she’d have liked to keep in a frame.

“Neville,” she panted.

“Yes, Pansy? You alright? Do you want to stop?”

“No. Absolutely _ fucking _ not. I’m not a quitter.”

As she continued to lower herself, he took one of her breasts into his hand and firmly rolled her nipple between his fingers, then dragged his other thumb through the wetness at her cunt up to her clit.

He didn’t scramble at her furiously, just brought the broad flat of his thumb over her in a firm, steady rhythm, over and over and _ over _ again.

_ How the _ fuck _ does Neville Longbottom know how to do _ that_, _ she wondered.

The second she took the last inch of him, feeling overwhelmingly, deliriously _ full_, she came, her thighs trembling around his hips and her cunt clenching for dear life around him.

She was boneless when he pulled out of her and flipped her over onto her back, and she fully expected him to push in again and fuck her into the mattress until he came. Instead, he moved to lie down next to her, and stroked the smooth skin of her belly with his fingertips while her chest rose and fell with her returning breath. It was lovely.

“What are you doing, Longbottom?”

“This?” he looked down at his hand. “Do you not like it?” He pulled his hand away.

She rolled her eyes, and pulled his hand back to where it was.

“No, it’s very, _very_ nice, but,” she looked meaningfully at his still extremely hard cock, “in my past experience, men have been in rather a hurry to take care of their erections.”

He had the audacity to blush.

“I can wait,” he said, “I wanted to give you a few minutes. Then I thought you might like another orgasm, if that’s alright.”

Pansy stared at him.

“And _ then _ what, Longbottom?” she whispered.

“Well, we could…”

“Don’t tell me, Longbottom,” she said. “_ Show _ me.”

And he did.

She came the second time with her hips at the edge of the bed, flat on her back with her knees in her hands, pulled away to the sides. She couldn’t be _ open _ enough, couldn’t give him _ enough _ of her as he stroked her steadily with his tongue and pressed his fingers into her aching cunt.

“Who taught you how to do this?” she asked, trying and failing to catch her breath.

“I learned,” he muttered around her clit, “from a book.”

The third time, she was on her side, back to Longbottom, leg draped over his hip, as he pressed into her in a steadfast, unfaltering rhythm. He pulled her hand down to her cunt, brought both of his to pinch firmly- just this side of _ too hard _ \- at her nipples, and watched over her shoulder as she swirled two fingers around her clit. It was so good. _ So good_. She realized after a moment she was saying it, over and over again, out loud.

“A _ book_?” she asked.

“Well, not _ just _ a book. A few witches have been willing to let me practice.”

“Of course they've been,” she laughed.

“I was terrible at _ everything_,” he breathed. “I didn’t want to be terrible at this.”

“You’re not,” she said, sliding her fingers over herself faster as she felt her body begin to tighten around him. “You most certainly are not.”

Her fourth one came while she was on her hands and knees in the middle of the bed, arching her back against him as he slammed into her from behind. One of his large hands gripped her hip and pulled her back against him, hard, with each thrust, while the other worked at her clit in exactly the way he’d watched her stroke herself before. It was the hardest, most relentless fuck of her life. She caught herself just before she drooled onto the pillow in front of her.

“Is this good?” he asked. His voice was, finally, strained. She felt a ridiculous surge of pride.

“It’s the best, Neville. It’s the _ best_,” she whispered into the pillow.

When she came, her limbs shook and she moaned, long and outrageously loud, like one of the women she’d seen in the pornographic moving pictures Blaise watched on the weird Muggle picture box he kept hidden in his closet during the summer between third and fourth years.

_ Silly_, she thought under the waves as they crested and broke in her body, but apparently the sound and sight and feel of her coming under him one last time was enough to break Neville, too, and he fell across her back, positively roaring into her shoulder, and _ bit _ her, hard.

As they collapsed into the damp sheets, Pansy on her stomach, Neville beside her with one of his long legs hooked between hers, she looked at the Muggle clock sitting on the nightstand.

It was 1 a.m. Merlin, how long had they been fucking?

“I ought to go,” she said once she’d caught her breath again, shifting her leg out from under his.

“Oh,” he said, flatly. “Do you have to work very early?”

“No…”

“Then stay.” He squeezed one cheek of her bottom in his hand, then gave it a light smack.

“Tomorrow’s Valentine’s Day, Neville.”

“So?”

“So, you, Neville Longbottom, want to wake up with _ me_, Pansy Parkinson, on Valentines Day? What are you going to do, order up chocolate-dipped strawberries and make tender love to me? Perhaps we could lick whipped cream from one another’s nipples?”

He smiled broadly with that dumb, beautiful mouth.

“Trite, but still,” he mused, “that doesn’t sound half bad, Parkinson.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“What can I say?” he laughed, rolling over to cover her body with his and mouthing softly at the back of her neck. “You’re rather my type.”

* * *

It was Tuesday morning when Pansy walked back into her cottage to find Blaise lolling about on her sofa, leafing through proofs of her Fall/Winter collection.

As soon as he heard the front door open, he shouted, without looking up at her, “Gods, Pans, I've been Flooing you for ages. I had to Portkey out here, you know. Glad to know you’ve not been kidnapped by a vampire coven. Wait until you hear what’s happened.”

“Draco shagged Granger,” she said, dropping her clutch on the console table by the door and wincing as she bent to shuck her heels.

“How’d you know? Did he Owl you?”

“Merlin help him if he had,” she muttered. She’d showered, more than once, with Neville, but she was desperate for a wash that actually got her clean. “I saw the pictures from the _ Prophet_. Anyone in the Wizarding world who _ doesn’t _know they’ve shagged hasn't been paying attention.”

“Too true,” sang Blaise. “You’ve had _ three _ owls since I arrived this morning,” he continued, “You won’t believe this, but one of them looks like it’s from Neville blinking _ Longbottom_. You remember, that Hufflepuff kid?"

"_Gryffindor_," she murmured.

He finally looked up from her line of form-fitting women’s trousers and blouses with masculine tailoring details. “What in Merlin’s mystical ballsack happened to _ you_?”

Pansy pulled a hand through her normally perfect bob, now a mess of partially tangled strands. Her make-up had been long gone 24 hours ago. She'd legitimately been too knackered to do anything to fix any of it.

"You wouldn’t believe me if I told you," she said.

She pulled her wand from her pocket and headed into the kitchen to conjure herself a cup of tea.

“Whoa, Pans, where’d your wand just come from?”

Palming the hot cup under her chin, Pansy sighed.

“_Pockets_, Blaise. It has pockets.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can be found on [Tumblr](https://pacific-rimbaud.tumblr.com/).


	2. A Plain White Tee

The first letter had arrived while her knickers were still damp with the both of them.

_ Tuesday, February 15th _

_ Pansy, _

<strike>_ Thank you for _ </strike>

<strike> _ I had a _ </strike>

<strike> _ I’ll never for _ </strike>

_ Owl me soon? _

_ Neville _

There was an ink splatter near the bottom where he’d apparently dropped his quill.

She didn’t owl him back.

The second one came in the evening, while she was getting into the soaking tub in her family’s London townhouse. She’d forged ahead through that disastrous, maudlin photo shoot with Draco and Hermione, both idiots, and then she’d had owls throughout the day from Narcissa giving her updates on Lucius, also an idiot. She was done for the day- for the _ month _\- with Malfoys and soon-to-be Malfoys and ready to let her stress dissolve in a steaming fug of scented bath oil. 

_ Thursday, March 2nd _

_ Pansy, _

_ I hope you’ve been well. I’m back in London for a while. Floo me if you’d like? _

_ I think of you often. _

_ Neville _

She brought the creased parchment close to her nose and inhaled, but she couldn’t find the scent of him on it anywhere.

She dropped the letter on the floor next to the tub, closed her eyes and breathed in a mouthful of perfumed steam, floral notes over an earthy, vegetal base, potent and expensive. 

For the first time, she found it...disappointing. 

She received the third letter in her Paris studio, pins in hand and squinting at the hem of a bridesmaid’s dress, her wand clenched between her teeth. 

_ Monday, March 20th _

_ Pansy, _

_ I’m in Tokyo for two weeks, but I have the weekend free. _

_ I can meet you anywhere. _

_ Neville _

In the bottom right corner, a hasty post-script read:

_ I can’t stop thinking about the way you taste. _

She had the Portkey ordered within an hour. 

* * *

Four days later, she arrived just outside of the Coredo Muromachi shopping complex in Nihonbashi, black leather weekender bag in hand, and from there Apparated into the lobby of her hotel.

Housed in the top floors of a luxury tower rising above its neighbors in the Tokyo skyline, it was exclusively for Wizarding guests, and she was shown into her suite by a pretty young witch who eyed Pansy's knee-length blush pink dress.

"Do you like it?" Pansy asked.

"It's so beautiful," the girl gushed.

“You look like a sample size,” Pansy said. “I’ll have my assistant send one in this style over. Show this card in one of the witches’ dress shops in Ginza that carry my line, and they'll adjust it for you.”

As she kicked off her heels, she reached into her pocket and pulled out a business card with the Parkinson logo and handed it over.

“It has pockets!” the girl exclaimed, and Pansy gave her a wry smile.

"One of my signatures,” she answered.

Half an hour later, she sat on the end of the minimalist platform of her bed and watched the sun sink in an amber band behind a sparkling sea of skyscrapers, the symmetrical silhouette of Mount Fuji behind them to the west.

What was she _ doing _ here?

Fucking Longbottom.

Which she'd told herself she’d never do again.

It wasn’t that she didn’t _ want _ to: quite the contrary. It was that she rather _ did _, and while she had expected that time, distance and ignoring his owls would let the embers die out on that little conflagration, she could feel them smouldering away all the time.

The thoughts were intrusive.

Sitting in a meeting with a Paris client, she thought of slouching in a different chair, the feel of a three-star hotel towel against her skin, untucked and pooled at her hips. Her skin was still damp from the shower. Neville’s hand covered one breast, and his head was between her legs. If she closed her eyes she could almost feel the curls of his hair, nearly black when it was wet, between her fingers.

Upon returning from Italy, flushed and exhilarated despite her best efforts to quash the weird giddiness she’d felt all week, she felt her cheeks go pink when Hermione asked, “Did you have a good time?” 

“The best!” she responded, and her belly flipped. 

_ The best_, she heard herself whisper on another day, in another room, dewed with sweat and quivering on Neville’s cock.

“I’ll tell you all about it," she said to Hermione, "but let’s get set up for the publicity shoot today, hm?”

She wouldn't tell her _ all _ about it. Never _ anyone _ all about it.

And then there were the times, waiting in line at a boulangerie or sitting in the window seat of her bedroom in London sketching an idea for a formal gown, when she thought of him awake at 5 a.m., sitting in a chair at his hotel room desk and reading through a stack of parchment. He’d put on a pair of inane cotton pajama bottoms in stripes of Gryffindor red and gold, and tapped the end of a quill against his bottom lip. She’d watched him for a long time, eyes tracing the curve of his jaw, his neck, the lean line of his belly rising and falling softly with his breath, until he looked up and saw that she was awake. He came back to bed, then, and within a few moments she was shoving the pajama bottoms down his legs with her feet.

“I hate them,” she whispered across the breaks in his kiss, “More...than I’ve ever...hated anything...in my entire life.”

When he pushed into her, he was trying not to smile. 

The worst part was that she’d tried to be interested in someone else, _ anyone _ else, in the meanwhile, but every attempt she made ended with her trying not to hex the balls off of some unctuous, self-satisfied prick in a bar or at a party before he could even ask to Floo her sometime.

She was simply going to have to fuck it out of her system.

The thought made her wriggle where she sat.

She’d come prepared.

Her weekend bag was neatly packed with several day dresses and some suitable for an evening out, a silk robe, and three sets of the sort of window dressing that men like so much: stockings and garter belts, translucent knickers that went halfway up the backside on purpose, bras with gratuitous straps that hinted at kinky pleasures and were either cut so low they barely concealed one’s nipples or sheer enough to put them on full display. 

She’d bought all this baroque frippery in Paris, on the same day she’d had a full-body scrub, been oiled, plucked, and magically depilated, skin made so soft and smooth in every distant corner and secret seam that it shone.

She was going to seduce him over dinner, then after kissing him until she made that stupid, delicious mouth of his plead for more, she would short-circuit his brain with her under things, ride him until he begged, and slide her hot mouth over his cock until he cried. She’d make Neville Longbottom come so hard it would wipe that easy, comfortable Gryffindor smile right off his face, and remind them both that she was in control.

Of herself, or of him? Either would do.

Once her clothes were hung and smoothed with a quick spell, she went to the bathroom and spent twenty minutes strapping herself into a garter belt and a tiny pair of sheer knickers, clipping lace-topped stockings into the garter straps, settling everything just so, and hiding it all underneath a little black dress. It was a vintage-inspired piece from her own line: prim, even a bit twee, from the front with a high neckline and cap sleeves, but backless, with a fitted skirt that played with the idea of being just a little _ too _ short. It followed the lines of her body like an impeccably tasteful second skin.

Finally, she fussed at the borders of the red lip she’d perfected and magically sealed hours before.

She looked young and sharply beautiful, ready for a night that could be classy or wild or both. She was a witch with _ possibilities._

The knock at her door made her insides jolt, and she fumbled the cap back onto the tube of lipstick before reminding herself to not yank the door off its hinges as she opened it. 

He stood there, in a plain white shirt and a black tie, with his hands in his pockets like he was ready to go whistling about Hogsmeade with his Gryffindor mates.

His sleeves were rolled up past his elbows.

_ Merlin’s braided _ fucking _ merkin _, she wanted him.

“Heya, Pansy,” he said.

She answered by gripping his shirt front and pulling him into her.

She needed to smell him.

Rising onto her toes, she threaded her fingers into his dark hair, pulled him down to press her face into his neck and _ breathed _.

“I’m sorry I didn’t owl,” she said quietly into his skin.

_ Damn_.

She hadn’t meant to say it, hadn’t even really _ thought _ it before it came flying out of her mouth like that Golden Snitch Potter nearly choked on.

“It’s alright,” he answered, wrapping his arms around her and pressing her tightly. “We never said. You weren't obligated.”

“I got your letters, and I read them, and they didn’t smell like you,” she said. She felt drunk, or dosed with Veritaserum. Her plan was unraveling; she needed to stun him with her fancy underwear, get him safely leashed and licking out of her palm. Perhaps even literally.

Instead, he _ laughed_.

“I’ll see what I can do next time,” he said.

_ Merlin _ they both needed to shut up.

Pansy tugged at his hair to pull his mouth down to hers, and it was like a breath of wind across a dying blaze on a dry day in August.

Everything was on fire.

She needed him inside of her. Five minutes ago would have been perfect, but _ now _ would have to do, and as she bit at his bottom lip with her teeth and then opened up her mouth to his tongue, she reached between them and stroked his cock firmly through his trousers.

His hips jerked, and then he murmured, “Hey, there’s no rush,” and circled the back of her wrist with his thumb. “We have lots of time.”

_ No, we absolutely do not _ , she thought. _ I’ve spent five weeks, three days and twelve hours being haunted by the ghost of this _ fucking _ cock and I need it. _

_ I need it _ now_. _

“_Now_,” she said out loud. And then, begging like a sodding schoolgirl, "_Please_."

He kissed her hard on the tail end of a sigh, pressed his hips into her belly and said, “Alright.”

He reached down to grab the backs of her thighs, lifted her off her feet and pressed her into the wall. She could feel his cock through his trousers, its length slotted perfectly against her, and without taking her mouth from his she dragged herself against him once, and again, feeling her knickers slip against the wet heat building at her cunt.

He moved one hand between them, and the soft clink of his belt buckle and the sound of sliding leather made her shiver.

She reached down and yanked her knickers to the side.

“Are you...are you wet enough?” he panted. "I can…"

She nodded quickly, and urged him forward with her heels.

Resting his forehead on hers, he looked down between them while he guided his cock into her in one slow, easy stroke.

“Oh, _ gods,_” he breathed as he watched himself disappear inside her.

She could say nothing, only take deliberate breaths as her body worked to stretch around him. Soon, she began to roll her hips, starting a rhythm that he matched with short strokes that kept the base of his cock dragging against her clit.

If Pansy had ever made a bet that she would never allow herself to look and sound completely fucking desperate with a man’s cock buried inside of her, she would have lost.

She was like an explorer dying of thirst in the desert who had stumbled on an oasis, only the desert was five weeks without _ this _, and the well she drank from was Neville broom-bungling plant-plucking Longbottom and his rolled up shirt sleeves and implausibly brilliant dick.

_ "Yes_," she whimpered repetitively, and also "_Ohfuckohfuck," _ and once, hideously, _ "I love this fucking cock,_" all of which he swallowed up in long, thirsty draughts with his mouth to hers.

Her body began to tense early, coiled tight like an overwound key in a music box, and when he pulled a hand from behind her thigh to thumb at her clit, she grabbed it with her own and threaded her fingers through his.

"I don't need it," she said, and he shuddered, then brought their hands to the wall above her head and began to move his hips faster.

"Come with me," she whispered.

He squeezed her hand in his, and as her hips began to tilt frantically against him, she pleaded with him so quietly she wasn't sure she meant him to hear it at all. 

"_Please, please, please_.”

"Okay. Shh, I will, it’s okay."

With that she came, hard and fast, clutching him with her legs and her cunt so tightly all he could do was rock his hips into her while she pressed a silent, open-mouthed cry against his lips. He thrust into her two more times, and then groaned hoarsely while their bodies stuttered against one another. Her long sigh as she came down was equal parts satisfaction and relief.

They slid down the wall together and came to rest on opposite sides of the narrow entryway with their legs tangled, drawing air into their lungs, fingers still loosely woven.

Neville tucked himself back inside his trunks with his free hand, tilted his head back against the wall and gazed at Pansy.

“Hello,” he smiled.

She grinned weakly back at him and blinked, slowly, like a house cat in a patch of sun.

His eyes traveled down her body to the straps trailing up into her skirt from the tops of her stockings, and without shifting himself from where he was splayed against the wall and entwined around her exhausted limbs, he reached down and gave one of them a gentle twang.

“These are awfully nice,” he said. “You hungry for dinner?”

* * *

The next morning, they both woke up late and had a slow, lazy fuck before ordering up white rice with fried eggs, miso soup, and green tea, and eating breakfast at the dining table- Neville in his trunks and white tee shirt, Pansy in her silk robe- while watching the city buzz below.

When they'd finally dressed, she dragged him to over half a dozen witches' shops in Ginza, the sorts that were sparsely merchandised, with clothes that people sometimes referred to as _ investment pieces_. She’d look at him appraisingly from the side of her eye and ask him his opinion on everything she tried on. He gamely weighed in on traditional witches’ robes in emerald green, elaborately embroidered, for formal Ministry functions (“Very nice. They look like something Gran would wear,”) to a pair of blood red thigh-high dragon skin boots with four-inch heels, just to get a reaction (“I had hip waders like that once, only a different color. And the heel was a bit different.”)

In a wizards’ clothing shop, she piled his arms with soft dress shirts, natty ties, close-fit wool trousers, and sweaters made from the hair of some kind of magical hissing Nepalese mountain goat that had to be sung to while combed, not sheared, to harvest its long, silky fibers. She made him try everything on, then smiled to herself with what she would have called _ pride _ if she didn't know any better when she overheard the shop girls whispering to one another that he was _ awfully _ good-looking.

They weren't wrong in the least.

“The sweater alone is a month of my Ministry salary,” he protested with a laugh when she suggested he looked particularly edible wearing a deep burgundy pullover over a nicely tailored checked shirt, a simple tie, and tweed trousers, and in the end she was only able to persuade him to accept the handwoven scarf in a red and green Tartan she’d purchased herself and had wrapped and bagged before he could tell her no.

She didn't allow herself to touch him familiarly in public, up until Neville pulled to a stop in front of a Muggle department store and smiled broadly.

“Hey, Pansy, look! It's Tokyo Cat,” he said, pointing to a display featuring the figure of a simplistic white cartoon feline with a massive round head, yellow oval nose and a bow at its left ear. “I’ve seen _ loads _ of it around the city. I think it's the Japanese Muggles' mascot,” he said earnestly. "Do you suppose they have pajamas with it on?" She grabbed his hand in hers, and her shoulders shook while she pressed her face into his arm to hide her smile.

They took the Muggle train from Ginza to Setagaya just to watch the city stream by and then eat bowls of spicy ramen, and afterward Apparated to Shibuya to find a karaoke box, a concept which neither of them fully understood until they were faced with electronic equipment they didn’t know how to use and a list of Muggle songs they’d never heard of.

"_Should I stay or should I go now?_” shouted Neville into some kind of voice amplifying device.

“_Go_, Neville,” barked Pansy dryly, sipping chilled sake from a wooden box. “Go. Now. You’re _ done_.”

Neville drank beer and sang poorly, and then played the tambourine while Pansy drank sake and sang well. After he’d had one too many to Apparate them both without possibly splinching one of them, and Pansy had one too many to walk without wobbling and was absolutely going to splinch everyone, they grabbed a Muggle cab, and kissed in the back seat, scattered and hungry for one another, on the drive back to the hotel.

When they arrived, Neville steadied her way into the lobby, where she told him it was time for a nap. He picked her up and slung her over his shoulder. 

"Neville," she stage whispered into the small of his back as he piled them both into the lift.

"Yes, love?" He massaged the back of her thigh.

"It’s your bum," she muttered, patting it.

“Yes, it is,” he answered, gripping her firmly as the lift rose. 

"Did I ever tell you how _beautiful_ it is?” she crooned, chomping at it with both hands. “You can’t see it, so you have to believe me when I tell you that it’s _ perfect_. Say you believe me, Neville."

"I believe you, Pansy."

"_Especially _ when you’re just out of the shower. I'm going to design for it. I'll build an ad campaign around it. And then I'll _ bite _ it."

“That sounds brilliant,” he said, rounding the corner from the lift toward her room, “let’s just get you through this door and we’ll sort that all out.”

“But first, I’m going to suck your cock.”

“Okay,” he coughed. “let’s revisit that idea in the morning.”

“But I want to _ now _, Neville,” she whined as he kneed her door open. 

“That is definitely not happening,” he replied, approaching her bed and laying her out across it.

He sent for a hotel elf, and asked for anti-nausea, sobriety, sleeping and hangover draughts. She turned onto her side and watched him move about the room, conjuring a glass of water next to the bed and pulling an extra blanket from the closet.

“Lovely, lovely, _ lovely _ Neville,” she sang softly, bundling her knees up to her chest.

“You know what’s _ funny_,” she continued, changing gears and volumes entirely, “is that you’re brought up being told there's a way to do it all _ properly._" She paused in thought. "You're to _ move _ properly, to _ speak _ properly, to _ comport _ oneself, to be intelligent, but not so much so that it _ threatens _ anyone, to be _ perfectly _ beautiful, just to net the right wizard from the right family and make him the right children. And then he goes and falls in love with an ass. I mean,” she shook her head, “a girl’s ass. A dentist’s ass. _ Two _ whole dentists, I think.” She yawned into her pillow. “And _ gods _ it’s a nice ass. I mean, it’s clever as blazes, and you can’t fault the _ ass _ here, Neville, but what was the _ point _ of it all?”

She watched him as he pulled off his shoes and straightened the room.

"Draco's an ass man, then?" he laughed.

“He is," she confirmed. "I’d have blown you _ brilliantly,_ by the way,” she grumbled, closing her eyes and tucking her arm under her head. “You’d have had entire _ dreams _ about it.”

“I have no doubt whatsoever that’s true,” he answered, spreading the blanket over her.

“You know,” she continued, quiet again, “I never _ really _ was in love, before. Not with him. But I suppose I couldn't have known.”

He stilled.

“It’s rather dreadful, actually,” she sighed. “Sometimes it feels as though your heart’s been Transfigured into glass and someone’s letting a toddler walk around with it. It’s _ that _ alarming."

The elf Apparated into the room and handed Neville a bundle of stoppered glass vials, bowed slightly, and Apparated away.

Neville lifted her to sit up, unstoppered a vial and held it out to her.

“I _ hate _ the toddler, Neville,” she mumbled, knocking back the vial in one go and grimacing.

"I know, Pansy. Here, take these two as well.”

She was asleep within half a minute.

* * *

In the morning, she remembered up until the point of getting out of the cab at the hotel, but nothing about their conversation.

Neville had her tip back the hangover draught immediately, and for the rest of the day they lounged about the hotel room.

They ordered up food and tea, while Neville leafed through a handful of books he’d brought over from his hotel, and Pansy spread out all ten Japanese Muggle fashion magazines she’d bought the day before on the bed and scribbled notes about them in her sketchbook. For a long while in the afternoon they sat together in the bath, spelled to remain hot, sifting through a single copy of the Daily Prophet, spelled to remain dry.

“Finished?” Pansy asked Neville before flipping each page.

As it approached evening, Neville announced that it was time to go out.

“If I ask where we’re going, will you tell me?” she wondered.

“Dress for being outdoors,” he said, “at night.”

They ate thick udon noodles and crispy tempura at a counter, and then Neville took them on a walk, ending at the Sendagaya Gate of the Shinjuku Gyo-en, a large national garden.

“It’s almost dark, Neville, they’re closing. You’ll have to come back for the plants without me,” Pansy teased.

“Come on, you’ll see,” Neville said, taking her hand. They passed through a turnstile, where Neville swiped some sort of card to let them in, and then he pulled them to the right.

There was a gate: two rectangular doors set into a roofed wooden frame, the left one propped slightly open. Pansy could tell that it was not only an order of magnitude older than the post-Muggle war structures of the rest of the park, but also spelled and warded to the teeth against Muggle view.

Beyond the gate was a flight of deep earthen stairs framed in wood, turning out of view to the left.

Everything was silver-green and hushed as he led her around a curving trail that suddenly opened up into a grove of trees.

There were twenty of them, each a tall, black-limbed silhouette in the dusk, and all looked entirely bare, their stark branches twisting into a darkening sky. Pansy wondered what on earth they were doing here.

At the border of the grove there was a sort of potter’s shed, green with lichen, and from it emerged a man. He was older than the both of them, but not by many years, and he carried a lit wand in front of him.

“Neville, hey there,” he said. He had an American accent, not one she was entirely familiar with, but something like the wealthy witches from California Pansy sometimes met with in Paris and London.

“Heya, Tom,” Neville replied. “This is Pansy Parkinson,” he continued, gesturing toward her. “Pansy, this is Tom Akiyama, he’s a magicoentomologist with MACUSA.”

“Hey, Pansy, nice to meet you,” said Tom, arm out and ready to engulf her in one of those crude American handshakes.

Pansy placed her hand in his lightly, with relaxed fingers, palm angling down.

“MACUSA?” she asked, but before anyone answered her, both Tom and Neville’s attention was drawn up to the bare trees.

“It’s pretty much dark at this point, I think they’re about to go,” Tom said, and Neville nodded.

Tom muttered a quick "Nox," and the three of them were plunged into near-total darkness.

“What’s about to _ go_, Neville?” she pressed anxiously, but he didn't answer.

Nothing happened for a good two or three minutes, during which Pansy deeply questioned her interest in men who kept after dinner hours in the dark in closed public gardens, but then the space around them subtly began to grow lighter.

“Watch, Pans,” Neville whispered.

She watched.

And as she did, on every twig of every branch of every one of the trees in the grove, clusters of pale pink flowers slowly opened, and began to glow.

Each bloom contained only a tiny, luminous spark, but they grew in clusters of five or six, with four or five clusters to a twig, and seemingly infinite twigs on each branch. Within a handful of breathless minutes, the grove was lit up with a million little lights the color of sunset.

There was a scent, too, something like clematis and orange blossom, edibly sweet and heady. 

“Neville,” Pansy began, but he grabbed her hand and gave it a squeeze.

“That’s not even the best part,” he said quietly, and before she could ask what he could possibly mean, the moths began to come out.

They roused themselves from their hidden daylight places in the surrounding shrubs and grasses, shook out their wings, and flew.

They were a ghostly green, with enormous furred bodies and wide, stub-tipped wings edged in pale gold that made a buzzing sound as they beat the air. Each one was the size of a Galleon, and there were thousands and thousands of them.

Their broad wings lifted them away on careening flight paths, and as they ascended into the canopy of the trees, they, too, began to glow, their bodies and wings sparking into green-white luminescence as they circled the blossoms and hovered like hummingbirds to drink.

Pansy had never seen anything more beautiful in her life.

“_Prunus candentis _ and _ Macroglossum stellatarum _ _ luminosa_,” Neville said softly. “A night-blooming, luminescent cherry tree, and a glowing subspecies of the hummingbird hawk moth, both magical. They evolved together in Japan, but the moth died out here entirely subsequent to the Second Muggle World War, and the trees have really struggled since. These were the last twenty of them in Japan before the cultivation project we started last year."

He squeezed her hand and smiled at her with a look of deep contentment.

"My great-grandparents planted a magical hobby grove on an island in Washington state when they emigrated to America,” added Tom. “They preserved the moths there, on accident, and I've been working with the Japanese Ministry to reintroduce them here. Neville finally figured out the major puzzle pieces with the trees: the blight issues, helping with the bloom pattern, moisture problems and soil contamination, all that stuff. The blossoms have really gone nuts the last two seasons, so this is the largest generation of moths we've had by far."

Pansy watched as the moths floated and sparked around the blooms.

“This is what you do,” she said to Neville.

He shrugged.

“Yeah, but it’s not usually like this. Field work is more often boots ankle-deep in muck, four-inch thorns, things that try to poison you without you noticing,” he laughed.

“But you preserve things. Help them survive,” she said.

“Plant conservation, yeah,” he replied. 

Pansy stared at Neville, bathed in the shell-pink glow of perfumed cherry blossoms that carried little stars at their hearts, his face crossed with the countless tiny shifting shadows of shining moths that almost never were again, and kissed him.

Off in the grove, she could hear Tom and his big, American laugh. 

* * *

Pansy was set to Portkey in Tokyo at 6 o’clock on Monday morning and arrive in Paris at 10 o’clock on Sunday night, the only form of time travel she cared to explore.

At 4 a.m. her robe was invisible to her in the dark, and unwilling to wake him with an illuminated wand, she pulled Neville’s white tee shirt from the floor and tugged it over her head on the way to the bathroom.

She tried her best to be silent as she crept back toward the bed, but he sat up, propped himself on his elbow and stared at her. Something in his face looked wounded.

“What,” she asked.

He said nothing, but sat up more fully and swung his legs over the side of the bed.

“Neville, what’s wrong,” she pushed. _ He cannot cannot cannot say this was the last time_, she thought.

“Come here,” he said finally.

She walked cautiously toward him, pausing an arm’s length away before he reached out and wrapped his hands around the backs of her thighs and pulled her closer.

She stood between his knees.

He pressed his forehead into her chest, and breathed in deeply.

“Pansy,” he said.

She was petrified. She’d had a plan. It was all under control. What was it? It had something to do with naughty knickers, but they were buried at the bottom of her bag, entirely forgotten.

How had she forgotten them?

“This is my shirt,” he said hoarsely, rubbing the hem between his fingers.

“It is,” she admitted.

“I think,” he said, weighing his words carefully, “that you’re actually killing me right now.”

He lightly ran the tips of his fingers from the backs of her knees, over the backs of her thighs, over her backside, up the length of her back. She was entirely bare underneath.

“Do you want me to take it off?” she asked.

His hands stilled.

“_No_,” he answered. “Yes. No. I don’t know.”

She smiled, and dropped to her knees in front of him.

He was hard even before she began to press kisses against the inside of his knees, and by the time she had reached into his trunks and pulled him out, the tip of his cock was leaking against her hand.

She licked the thick bead of moisture away from his head, and looked up at him through her eyelashes while she flicked her tongue softly around him.

He looked completely lost.

She moaned as she sank her mouth around his head, letting wet trails drip from her mouth and down his length to where her hand circled his base, because she liked this, too: how good her tongue felt lapping against him; how smooth his skin was here; how pleased she felt when his cock pulsed under her fingers as she built a rhythm between her hand and her mouth that covered every inch of him.

She wanted to see how far she could take him, and with every down stroke of her mouth, her wrist twisting her hand around him and her tongue flicking against him, she brought him closer to the back of her throat.

“Don’t choke,” he gasped while his breath quickened in his belly. “Please. I don’t want you to.”

She nodded with the head of his cock still resting on the back of her tongue, and swallowed around him.

She went slowly, sliding up and down his length with deliberation and patience, and listened to him unravel.

He touched her, too.

He stroked a hand slowly through her hair. Circled his thumb at the nape of her neck. Curved along the helix of her ear. 

He ran curious fingertips around her mouth while it stretched around his cock, and then reached down to roll her nipple with wet fingers through the fabric of her shirt.

_ His _ shirt.

She clenched her thighs together, and slid her mouth over him faster.

“Pansy.”

She nodded.

“I’m...I’m going to...you should stop.”

She shook her head.

“I don’t want you to...if you don’t like it.”

She nodded.

“_Please_, Pans." His belly heaved with his breathing. "Only if you really want to.”

She moaned, pulled him as far back as she could toward her throat, and when he curled around her, coming against her tongue with a cry of "_Pansy_," she swallowed him down.

He picked her up and put her down on the end of the bed.

When she came, she could see herself reflected in the glass of the hotel window, a ghost with blurred edges. She had washed away her make-up before bed, and she wore a white tee-shirt, pushed up around her shoulders while his hand pulled at the peak of one breast. Her ankles were hooked together against his back, and her arms were cradled around his dark head of hair, his mouth and fingers working between her legs. 

Beyond her, the lights of Tokyo burned through the last hour of the night.

* * *

The fourth letter came while she was wrapping up a conversation with Hermione over the Floo about whether or not a lipstick she'd recently sent her from Paris, that she quite adored and _ really _ didn't want to have to stop using, was cruelty free (Pansy knew better than to send her anything that wasn't).

_ Wednesday, March 29th _

_ Dear Pansy, _

_ I asked a colleague at Mahoutokoro, and she suggested I try a potion. A magical perfume, actually. Its core formula is a relative of Amortentia, but the sole impact is that the recipient will detect a scent they associate with the sender. I’m not sure how this will work; I've been told it can be quite unpredictable. You could smell old beer in a karaoke box, or the inside of a train car. _

_ I hope it’s something pleasant. _

_ Thank you. I’ll never forget it. Any of it. _

_ Neville _

Pansy brought the parchment to her nose and inhaled.

It had top notes of cherry blossoms and lichen, earthy and sweet, but on the other side of those, the single, unmistakable heart note was him. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can be found on [Tumblr](https://pacific-rimbaud.tumblr.com/).
> 
> The dialogue of the exchange between Hermione and and Pansy when the latter returns from Italy is directly quoted from Lovesbitca8's The Right Thing to Do:
> 
> "As she scurried to save the paperwork on her desk that was slowly being plowed over, Hermione said, 'Did you have a good time?'  
'The best! I’ll tell you all about it, but let’s get set up for the publicity shoot today, hm?'"


	3. A Practical Bathing Suit

Their affair lasted for 15 months, during which they spent a small fortune on Portkeys.

After Tokyo, the longest stretch they spent apart was 22 days in September while Pansy was presenting her fledgling show in Paris during Fashion Week.

The distance between them was _ completely _ fine, because she was _ Pansy _ . She was a _ Parkinson _ , and a _ Slytherin _ , cool and collected and _ ambitious, _ one step ahead of everyone, and for _Merlin’s_ sake, above and beyond all of these things, she was in _control_.

So when they reunited for two short days in an enigmatically fusty A-frame cabin in the middle of the woods on the northern California coast, she was aghast to discover that there, with him, she was less a goal-driven professional woman with her hand firmly at the helm of her life, and more a completely unraveled mess of need.

“I missed you,” he said. It was earnest and plain and she wanted to _ consume _ him.

He forced her to her slow down, drew her hand out of his trunks, and kissed her at a glacial pace with the length of his body pressed against hers for half an hour before he finally undressed her, and then himself. He fucked her slowly, with his chest pressed to hers, one of his hands drawing through her hair and the other traveling lightly over the skin at her waist, and she came twice, stretched out under an angled, knotted pine ceiling on a double bed made up with porridge-colored cotton sheets and a striped Pendleton wool blanket.

She felt calm, after. He had _ made _ her calm, which felt like a kind of losing.

Pansy _ hated _ losing.

They fucked, constantly and brilliantly, and the compartment of her life that Pansy chose to sort that into was labeled_ "fun" _.

They had a _ lot _ of fun over a three day weekend in a goldenrod-colored house on the Amalfi Coast in June, an overflowing abundance of it in an art-filled hotel in Shanghai in late October, and so much of it in front of a fire over an entire stolen week in an under-heated stone house in Scotland in December that she got a bit dehydrated.

It ought to have fallen apart for the usual reasons: incompatibilities in their characters, disparities in their schedules, or a small irritation that grew and metastasized into something terminal.

They ought to have become _bored_.

Instead, they collapsed because of Martina de la Garza’s eight children and their tiny chickens.

* * *

Neville’s field of study was trees, and he was apparently something of a genius about them, which meant that he traveled all over the world chasing after something that stood perfectly still.

He was set to spend half of their second April and all of May up in the branches of the rain forest in Costa Rica, studying under a world-renowned researcher of magical canopy flora and living on the sprawling property she shared with her large family.

“I’ll come back to Paris over the weekends. You needn’t come all the way out to Central America,” he suggested, tracing her sweat-slicked hipbone with his index finger. “It’s not exactly five-star luxury. There are farm animals.”

She was sated and feeling generous.

“We take turns, though,” she insisted. “You can’t do the traveling six weekends in a row. I’ll have to come out at least once, or I’ll owe you too much.”

“You’ll _owe_ me? Is that how this works?” he laughed.

“That’s how _everything_ works,” she replied, and pulled his mouth down to hers.

She Portkeyed from Paris well after dinner, and arrived standing in the middle of the red tile courtyard of the de la Garza compound just in time for lunch.

She wore a summer dress in white linen with thin straps that tied at the shoulders, and the humidity hit her skin like a blast wave.

A teenage kid with an undercut, wearing a Muggle tee shirt that inscrutably read _ AC/DC _ came shuffling out of one of the interior doors.

“Hey.”

“Hello,” replied Pansy. “I’m looking for…”

“Neville’s out in the trees with Mamá, they’ll be coming in for lunch right now.” His English was flawless, his accent like a hard fence around voluptuously curved vowels. He looked her up and down and smirked.

“What,” she shot at him.

“I wondered what he’s been so anxious about, but yeah." He nodded approvingly. "I get that.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be at school?” she narrowed her eyes.

The kid just laughed and pointed her through an archway, where a wide patio was bordered by a carved stone balcony. A break in the balcony gave way to a slope that flattened out to a mowed meadow ringed in dense forest.

There was a troupe of kids rolling around in the grass, about six of them who looked to be between the ages of two and twelve, a mix of girls and boys, all of them with dense, curling black hair and sun-bronzed skin.

She watched them roughhousing for a while, until one of them twitched its attention toward the edge of the forest, and shouted “Mamá!”

A dark-haired woman in her late 30s that Pansy took to be Martina strode from the tree line, talking with her hands, and just behind her, hunching his shoulders and listening attentively, was Neville.

He seemed lanky and loose-limbed next to the compact little woman in front of him, and his hair was slightly damp, like he’d been briefly caught in the rain. He wore a pair of tan workman’s trousers and a rumpled blue chambray shirt with the top two buttons open and the sleeves haphazardly rolled.

He looked completely at ease.

The smallest three of the de la Garza children broke from the pack and ran toward Neville and Martina, the middle of them attaching himself to Martina’s hand, and the largest wrapping her fingers around Neville’s bare forearm and lifting up her feet so that his muscles tensed, and she swung off the ground. He reached down with his free arm and slung the littlest one up over his shoulders, where it grabbed two handfuls of Neville’s hair and clung to it like reins.

Pansy stared.

She’d pictured herself as the mother of children before. She was a pureblood, a Parkinson, and had been brought up knowing that her primary purpose was to safeguard lineages and fortunes with healthy pureblood heirs, with the subordinate duties of maintaining her husband’s standing in the social fabric of the upper classes, collecting art, and doing the right sort of charity work. For many years, when she closed her eyes and imagined her future, it included overseeing a carefully selected house elf who would in turn oversee a little white-blonde child or two on the grounds of Malfoy Manor. When it became obvious that wasn't going to happen, she’d briefly entertained the idea of making a small Nott, but that was infeasible, too, for other, less immediately obvious reasons.

She’d never considered, not once in her long years of joyless, impassive fantasies of a future domestic life, the image of Neville Longbottom, damp and laughing, easy and content, with a pair of black-haired children in his arms.

It felt like discovering that a color had existed her entire life that she’d just become capable of seeing.

Halfway across the meadow, he spotted Pansy standing at the balcony. His face broke into that wide and unaffected smile of his, then he reached up and grabbed the tiny paw of the little child, lifted its fat arm into the air, and made it to wave. From its perch on his shoulders, the child threw back its head and laughed so hard that its face turned red. It looked shiny and round, like a delirious apple.

The midday light from overhead was golden, hot and punishing on her bare shoulders, but the heat that flared inside her had nothing to do with the directness of the sun. She felt the skin at her chest and cheeks bloom an angry pink, and her heart rate bolted.

She waved back.

Pansy liked to be in control. 

And she did not like to lose.

She was _ not _ in control.

And she was not just losing.

She was completely, irretrievably _ fucked _.

* * *

She continued to burn on the walk up to Neville’s room, which the eldest de la Garza child, a girl of around 16, showed her to with a slight air of hostility. The heat built as she waited, unpacking and smoothing her dresses, and when he came through the door a moment later she was opening her mouth to beg him to toss her onto his bed and wring her out like a washrag, but he held his hands up in a defensive gesture and protested, “Don’t touch me! Just a moment!”

He disappeared into the en suite bathroom, then she heard the shower running.

When he emerged, hair wet and hips wrapped in a towel, he pulled her into a kiss, then explained, “We’ve been working around the _ fructifero _ vine. It's an integral part of the magical canopy ecosystem, just _absolutely _fascinating, but its sap has extraordinary anti-estrogen properties for adult women. And monkeys. I mean, it impacts the women, of the monkeys. The monkey women.”

Pansy looked at him blankly.

“It works as a sort of natural fertility drug,” he said, then laughed nervously when Pansy looked ashen. “Not to worry, it washes off, and it has to come into contact with mucosal tissue, so your mouth, or your...um.” He coughed. “You wouldn’t want to get it your eyes, for instance. In any case, I know you’re on a potion, but we ought to use the contraceptive charm over the weekend as well. Not to be presumptuous.” He blushed. "I just mean to say...there are a _ lot _ of monkeys up there."

He looked haunted.

“Neville,” she said, taking a step closer. She needed to get into his towel. “I'd like to be _ presumed _. Right now, actually.”

She reached for his hand, brushed it against her cheek, then pulled his first two fingers into her mouth.

She curled her tongue along them slowly, then drew them out, lifted her skirt, and pushed his hand under the waistband of her knickers.

“Pansy,” he said, and his voice was both desire and a rebuke, but he’d already found her clit, and began to stroke at it lightly with a single wet finger.

She pressed her hips toward his hand, but he pulled back, circling over her without any pressure at all.

“Impatient,” he said softly. He sounded so terribly _ fond _ and his touch was so maddeningly weightless that she wanted to scream.

She reached up and tugged at one of the ties at her shoulder, then did the same at the other side.

“It’s lunch time, Pansy. They’ll all be waiting,” he whispered.

But she arched her chest toward him, and he brought his hand to her breast and brushed almost imperceptibly at the peak of her nipple with his thumb.

He was hard, she could see it through his towel, and she wanted him to fuck her.

Instead, he circled over her with those enraging ephemeral touches and followed the movements of her face like he was watching the weather change.

He made her come like that, alone and barely touched, shuddering and grasping at his wrists, and she felt more naked with her knickers still on and her dress pulled just below her breasts while he watched her than if she’d been paraded bare in the Great Hall at the Welcoming Feast.

When she’d finished shivering against him, he pulled his hand from her knickers and kissed her like he had no other plans in the world.

“Let’s go have lunch, shall we?” he smiled when he finally broke away, and turned to grab a clean pair of trousers.

Out of control.

Lost.

_ Fucked _.

* * *

The weekend rolled by like a wave, punctuated by rains in the afternoon that Neville and Pansy napped through after sweat-soaked sex, his door locked against spontaneous social calls from the 10-and-under set. 

She was set to Portkey back to Paris after lunch on Sunday, and on Saturday night the entire de la Garza clan sat around a table they’d just laid to waste while a pair of paid house elves began to clear the empty plates.

The youngest child, a toddler that called Neville “Nebull” and surreptitiously tried to lick him, had climbed into his lap and settled with its head on his chest, swirling its moist fingers around the middle button of his shirt.

Pansy sat to his right and, filled up on sweet red wine, had pulled her chair close to his in order to nestle under his arm. He’d wrapped himself around her, and stroked the skin at her elbow absently with his thumb.

They all adored him: all eight of the de la Garza children, but also Martina, her husband, and Martina’s mother, a stylish, cosmopolitan witch in her 60s who called him “Nevillito” with an arched brow and a smirk, and liked to slap his cheek. The adults showed him their affection by feeding him and teasing him mercilessly about his propensity for nearly falling out of trees, and the younger children communicated the same by bringing him the tiny chickens that ran free range around the yard, repeating the chickens' names to him, and making him hold them at the dinner table.

The chickens liked him so much that they fell asleep.

She'd watched him as he was constantly pressed into holding the children themselves, reading them stories in stilted Spanish, doing bits of poorly executed magic that made them laugh and scream that he ought to be sent back to school, and letting the little ones pull his hair back into tiny twists with an entire bristling collection of plastic hair clips.

He obliged them, all of them, always.

“Your chickens are extremely small,” Pansy said archly to one of the children on the smaller half of the age spectrum as it tried to hand her one, and the child laughed at her.

“They’re bantam hens,” said the teenage boy she’d met when she arrived, leaning back in an attempt at manly repose on the other side of the table. “They’re magical, though, and even smaller than the smallest Muggle chickens. You can teach them to sing, and their eggs all have very, very tiny double yolks.” He pinched his thumb and index finger together and squinted through the space between them.

“Brilliant,” drawled Pansy, holding a cheeping black and white chicken the size of a grapefruit away from her skirt as it puffed out four bars of a tune Pansy didn’t recognize.

“What was that?” she asked.

“_ Smells Like Teen Spirit _,” replied the boy.

“What does that _ mean?_” asked Pansy, and the boy shrugged.

She’d learned the day before that he was 14 years old, and home on holiday from Ilvermorny, along with the 16 year-old girl who hated Pansy because she was in love with Neville, and a 12 year-old brother who wanted to talk to Neville about what it felt like to lop the head off a giant snake.

There was a 10 year-old girl who Pansy liked very much, because she wanted to know all about Paris and liked Pansy’s clothes, and four younger ones who, as far as Pansy could tell, mostly concerned themselves with getting someone to permit them to eat cake.

Martina was talking to Neville about some kind of strangulating fig tree when the cheek-slapping grandmother sensed her moment, and struck.

“So,” she began, nonchalantly, looking artfully at Pansy, tucked into Neville's side, and taking a long sip of wine. “When are you two going to make some of these?” She pointed conspiratorially at her horde of grandchildren, one shy of a baseball team.

Neville, ostensibly still heavily invested in tree talk, paused his thumb mid-circle against her arm.

Pansy was taken completely off guard, wine-slow and outplayed by this shrewd, baby-hungry matron.

_ It's not like that _ , she felt she ought to say. _ What we do lives in the box labeled “fun” _.

But she didn't want to say that at all. Not even a little bit.

"We’ve never discussed it," she replied, and that sun-burned feeling radiated out across her cheeks again.

Neville's thumb resumed its lazy orbit.

The interfering grandmother’s lips curled up as she sipped her wine and peered edgewise at Pansy.

_ As I thought, _ her smile seemed to say, satisfied with itself. _ You’re fucked_.

* * *

On Sunday, the hard arithmetic of the hours they had left made her feel starved for him, like she needed to scoop him up with her hands and lick him from between her fingers before he was all gone.

The children showed them a swimming hole in the forest, liquid aquamarine under a canopy of green that was thick with sound and movement. Pansy Transfigured her knickers into a chic high-waisted black bikini, and Neville turned his pants into something approaching a pair of shapeless swimming trunks.

He took her hand, and they jumped in.

They swam, diving away from the children's splashes until they found their way behind a narrow waterfall, where they stood facing each other, shoulder-deep. Neville spoke loudly to her over the churning water.

“Come here,” he said, shaking the water from his hair. The loose spray of tiny freckles across his nose and cheeks had darkened after four weeks closer to the Equator, and a forelock of hair curled over his eyes. He grabbed her hip under the surface and pulled her into him, then brought his lips to her ear.

“Pansy Parkinson,” he whispered.

“Neville Longbottom,” she answered.

“I want to tell you something, only very quietly,” he said.

He pulled away, and searched her face for a moment. 

Tell me, she thought.

Tell me you’re fucked, too. If you tell me first, I’ll give you everything. You can be _ so _ terrible at Transfiguration, how are you _ that _ terrible, and you can walk around somehow being so fucking _ uncertain _ but also having that _ inane _ Gryffindor bravery written all over your face, and you can get fertility sap in my eye, and I won’t complain. I’ll go, instantly, to wherever it is that you are, and be naked for you, only for you, in whatever way you want me to be, and if you ask me one day, make it years from now, but if you _ ask_, I’ll make you a pair of black-haired children, and I’ll dress them well, and we’ll live in London or in Paris, but we’ll take them around the world and let them climb trees and keep the absolutely very smallest chickens we can find.

Only tell me, be the first to say, and I’ll let myself give you everything.

“I like your bathing suit,” he whispered.

She had hoped.

She had let herself _ hope_, she realized, and she had been wrong, and all she could do was laugh, so hard and for so long that she developed a stitch in her side, and then they kissed behind the waterfall until the children shouted at them in revulsion that they knew what they were up to.

Pansy climbed out to sit on a rock and dry, and watched Neville push screaming little de la Garzas out wide on a rope swing suspended from a tree. Their laughter passed up and away into the noise of the trees, while the moisture steamed from her skin.

* * *

They came in for lunch with their hair still wet, and after taking their leave from the family politely, they chased one another’s mouths in every hidden corner along the short walk to his room, until they finally made it behind his door, and closed it.

He pulled her dress over her head, and then he tugged first the top, and then the bottom of her bathing suit off and laid her across the width of his bed.

He pushed her knees to her chest, and gesturing to her to take over holding a knee herself, he grabbed his cock and guided it into her slowly.

It was intense like this, and he moved carefully.

“Tell me if it gets too deep,” he said quietly, scanning her expression as he pushed in further and her breath picked up.

He slid in all the way, and then began to pull out almost entirely and slowly enter her again, gradually picking up his pace until she rocked steadily underneath him.

“Do you want my hand or yours?” he asked.

“Yours,” she answered, before he’d finished speaking.

He brought his first two fingers down to circle at her clit, and Pansy watched, fascinated, as he lost himself in watching his fingers slide over her while he moved inside her, and his cheeks bloomed pink.

As she felt her body climb, so close she almost wouldn't have had the sense to catch it, the corner of his mouth tilted up.

“What?” she panted, prone and _ beyond _ full and aching to push back against the pressure of his fingers with her hips.

His eyes came back into focus on her face, and he broke into a coy grin, like he'd been caught in a misdemeanor he wasn't the least bit sorry about.

“_What?"_ she demanded, and her breath was rushing through her, reaching and grasping.

“You’re _ soaking_,” he said, finally, and his face was overwhelmingly tender and for some reason _ consoling_, and there was a laugh behind his words that he was carefully holding in.

She could feel it, then, the way his fingers slid across her, the way his cock slipped through her. Mortifyingly, she realized she could _ hear _ it. She refused to try, but she wouldn’t have been surprised if she could _ smell _ it, too.

It was fucking _ biological_.

He smiled like he’d been told a secret he couldn’t possibly keep in, and she fucking _ hated _ it.

“Stop…” she was nearly beyond speech, “...smiling.”

She moved her foot to push at his fucking _ horrible _ mouth, and when she did, he pulled her toe between his lips and sucked.

It was _ disgusting, _ watching him put a fucking _ toe _ in his fucking _ mouth_, but when she parted her lips to tell him off, the edges of her vision went white, and what rose out of her mouth was a raw, choking sob, actual _ weeping_, and she felt hot tears leak out of the corners of her eyes.

She came harder than she ever had in her life.

Neville had let go of her toe in shock, and watched her with wide eyes as she grasped and shook against his cock for _ ages_, sobbing and whining.

He fucked her dutifully until her body stilled, and when it finally did, he _ laughed_.

“You are _ not _ laughing right now,” she fumed, but when she pulled off of him and tried to wriggle off the bed, he wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her back to him.

“I’m sorry. I’m _ so _ sorry. That was the most beautiful...” he kissed the small of her back, “...thing...” her shoulder blade, “...I’ve _ever_...” he turned her over and mouthed at her collar bone, before placing a chaste kiss against her lower lip, “...seen.”

She let him take her mouth completely, then reached down to lazily pull at his cock, still slick with her.

When he reached between them to slip his fingers against her, she jerked her hips away.

“No, absolutely not. I’m all done,” she said firmly, then buried her face in his chest and choked on a laugh of her own.

“Neville,” she said, muffled against his skin, circling his base indolently with her thumb and middle finger.

“Yeah, Pans?” he answered.

“I came _so fucking _hard,” she said.

“Yeah. I know,” he nodded. “I’m _so_ sorry.”

Then they both weakly stifled their laughter until she squeezed her fist firmly around the head of his cock, and he went quiet.

When he was beyond concentrating on anything but her touch, she kissed him deeply, and stroked him until he came on her belly with a whimper.

* * *

She was leaving, within half an hour, but they were still naked, with his head resting on her sternum and her hand pulling lethargically through his hair, when they ended it.

“Pans?”

“Yes, Neville?”

He paused, then continued, carefully nonchalant.

“Hermione asked if I had . . . if I’d _ like _ to . . . she's been working on seating, apparently, and I wondered whether you’d want to go to the wedding together.”

She stopped her hand against his forehead.

It wasn’t that she’d never thought of it.

It was always there, a question mark that appeared whenever she thought about the wedding, and could get her mind past the monolith that the wedding clothes had become in her professional life as the day grew closer.

Their affair had lasted 15 months, and they’d spent a small fortune on Portkeys.

But they’d never told anyone.

Because it was casual. It lived in a box labeled "_fun"_.

So that Pansy could be Pansy. A Parkinson. A Slytherin.

Cool and collected and ambitious, and above all things, in control.

If they stayed like this, inside the box, the one of _fun_ and weekends and Portkeys, she could hide for a while. Maybe forever, if they stayed like this. But if she walked with him, even once, if she held his hand and walked into a room where everyone _knew_ her, if she did that with him, it would be done.

She would want to do it forever. 

Because above all things...

...above _all_ things...

...she was _fucked_.

In the moment where his question hung in the air unanswered, she felt like she was looking frantically for a door out of a room that she never wanted to leave.

Before she could say anything, he found it.

And then he let her kick it open.

“It’s alright. I know we’ve been keeping this casual,” he said.

She remained still for a moment, and then shifted to get off the bed.

“Right. And I generally don’t tell my friends about every casual fuck that I have,” she drawled.

He physically jolted, and she felt like she’d reached out and struck him.

It was cruel, even for her, and something worse than a lie, because it was true, but irrelevant, a fact that hadn’t belonged to them for months, if it ever had at all.

He said nothing.

“If you’re worried about bringing someone else," she continued, “We’re not exclusive. Bring whomever you’d like.”

He was quiet. 

_ Stop me_, she thought. _ I won’t stop myself_.

She put on fresh knickers, and the clean clothes she’d laid out for travel—a heavier dress for a colder place—and although she couldn’t bear to look at him, she could hear him turn to the edge of the bed and quickly pull on his shirt and trousers.

She cast a drying charm on her Transfigured bathing suit, shoved the pieces in her bag, and finally turned around.

All the beautiful color had drained out of his face.

_ Call me out_, she thought.

_ This is not casual. _

_ We’ve been _ together_, Neville, for over a _year_._

_I've followed you around the fucking world._

_ Because it isn’t casual. _

_ It never was, once I'd touched you. _

_ And it never will be. _

_ But I can’t be the one who says it. _

He rose, stepped close to her, and grabbed her bag from the floor.

_ Stop, and call me out_.

He walked to the bedroom door, turned, and waited for her to follow.

_ Tell me you can see how wrecked I am for you_, _ and I won't argue_.

But as she left his room for the last time and walked toward the courtyard, she realized with mounting panic that he wasn’t going to.

He’d _believed_ her: believed all of the signals she’d sent up, silent and aloud, about how easy it would be to disentangle herself from his sheets, and now that she had made her bluff in full, clearly and unavoidably, he wasn’t going to call it. He was simply going to fold his cards, and let her win.

She was in control, finally.

It felt _ exactly _ like losing.

Every member of the de la Garza family came into the courtyard to say goodbye, and she put _ besos _ in the air next to the cheeks of every one, whether it was the right thing to do or not.

The second to littlest tried to give her a chicken to take with, a miniature pure white hen that gave her finger an exploratory peck, but she pushed it gently back, and said, “I can’t take it. I don’t have any chickens of my own, and it will be lonely.”

“You ought to get one. Get a chicken,” the little boy said. “And then I can give you this one, and they’ll marry.”

The chicken looked at her with its tiny reptilian eye, and hummed a few bars of a staccato tune.

She looked up at the teenage boy.

“_Another One Bites the Dust_,” he said. 

* * *

It was the middle of June, and raining in London.

“Hold _ very _ still, Hermione,” muttered Pansy around the wand clenched between her teeth, slipping a pin through three layers of white silk.

“I’ll do my best,” said Hermione, and Pansy could feel the nerves coming off her in waves.

“It’ll be fantastic,” said Pansy, rising to stand and look at the gown from a distance. “Narcissa was literally raised to do this, and I don’t mean that in the vernacular sense. She was _ literally _ raised by her own mother for the express purpose of making a society wedding come off, Muggle-born bride be damned. Don’t give me that look, you know what I mean. You’ve nothing to be nervous about, except maybe giving Draco a hard-on in front of the dearly beloved gathered there that day, so maybe don’t bend over directly in front of him.” She narrowed her eyes appraisingly at the gather she’d made. “No, that manages to make even your ass look dowdy. Absolutely bizarre. Up again three-eighths of an inch.”

“We’ve finalized the seating chart,” remarked Hermione.

“That must’ve been a lovely conversation,” answered Pansy, slipping out the set of pins she’d just placed.

“It was twelve conversations, all of them rather heated.”

“You got off lightly. Aiming for inter-House unity, I imagine? Or are you going for a re-enactment of the Battle of Hogwarts, in full regalia?”

“I’ve got you between Theo and Blaise, if that’s alright,” said Hermione.

“As long as Blaise keeps his hands to himself, or to Daphne, or at least to that secretary.”

“He’s terrified of Melody.”

“Well, he ought to be, I think she gave him a sprain.”

“I’ve got Ron next to Luna, since neither of them is bringing a date, and Harry and Ginny obviously, and then Neville Longbottom’s bringing someone—bollocks, I’ve got to Floo him and confirm who it is,” said Hermione, pulling at the fabric under her arm. “This is rubbing a little, can we bring it down slightly?” When Pansy didn’t answer, she looked up. “You alright, Pans? You look a little peaked.”

“Oh, I’m fine, I just haven’t had much of an appetite. Work, stress, sort of thing. The deadline marches near,” she replied, “and Ginny’s getting bigger every second. I’ll be adjusting her right up to the day. You sure you don’t have any other, less _expectant_ close female friends, discounting me?”

Pansy carefully placed a pin at each of Hermione’s underarms, then turned away from her, sighed heavily and pressed her fingertips to her eyes.

“What’s this?” asked Hermione, plucking something out from underneath the back of the arm of Pansy’s dress.

Pansy turned to look.

Pinched between Hermione’s thumb and index finger was an extraordinarily tiny, opaque white feather.

Hermione looked it over with that pompous investigative glare she used to wear constantly at school.

“If it wasn’t so ridiculously small, I’d say it was a chicken feather,” she laughed. “Where on Earth would you have picked this up on your dress? If I didn’t keep hearing about how vehemently chaste you’ve been for the last year and a half, I’d suspect you’d been embroiling yourself in pillow fights.”

Pansy swallowed.

“I must have picked it up abroad,” she replied, lightly. “I haven’t worn this dress since,” she paused, “the second weekend in May, I believe. I think I only Portkeyed in it and hung it up straight away.”

“Well, wherever you went, I want to go to there, if they have miniature chickens. Sounds delightful."

“It is,” replied Pansy quietly. “But I only went once.”

“It’s silly,” Hermione began, her voice taking on that tinge of know-it-allness that Pansy was teaching herself to find endearing, “but in British Muggle culture, there was a period of time where women would give men a white feather to shame them into enlisting in the military. It was a symbol of cowardice.” She held out the little snow-white feather. “But I can’t imagine you ever being afraid of anything.” 

Pansy took it, and twirled it in her fingers.

“You’d be surprised,” she said. She pulled her wand from her pocket, and with a swish and flick, muttered “_Wingardium Leviosa_.”

Hermione and Pansy watched the feather rise, and twirl languidly in the air.

Hermione laughed, and Pansy followed, the bittersweet tang of a shared and complicated childhood on both of their tongues, until their eyes were wet.

* * *

The family had left her and Neville alone in the courtyard to say their goodbyes.

She pressed herself against him, tentatively, and he brought his arms around her shoulders. They felt lifeless.

“Will you come, before the wedding? I’ll be busy, but I could make time, and you could come. At least once,” she asked, and she thought she might have managed to sound like a passable simulacrum of herself.

He was silent for a moment.

“For a casual fuck?” he asked. He smiled, and it was such a fake fucking _ cheap _ imitation of what he looked like when he was happy that she wanted to slap it straight off his face. “I’ll owl you if I’m keen.”

There was no vitriol in his voice. Nothing to fight.

Pansy could feel a hard stone sitting in her throat, and if she tried to speak around it, it was going to break her completely open.

Instead, she lifted up on her toes, and pressed her mouth to his. She licked at him, tried to get him to open up to her, but he pressed against her in a hard line, closed off and polite. His only tells were the way his body leaned into hers, a habit learned over a year, and the fierce grip that both of his hands had on the fabric at the back of her dress.

When she came back down, he looked away, then back again.

“Well. I’ll see you.”

“Alright, Longbottom. I’ll see you.”

She picked up her bag.

“It’s been _fun_,” she trilled, and she wanted to vomit. 

“Sure,” he said.

She was Pansy, a Parkinson, and a Slytherin, like a fucking snake, hiding under a rock, and she loved control, best of all, above anything, above anyone.

Fuck, fucking, _ fucking, fucked_.

When she arrived back in Paris, the cool air hit her skin like a blast wave. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can be found on [Tumblr](https://pacific-rimbaud.tumblr.com/).


	4. A Bridesmaid's Dress You Can Wear Again

"What you need," said Blaise, perched on the back of a chaise longue like a smarmy gargoyle, "is a phenomenal shag."

He bit contemplatively into the flesh of a perfectly ripe nectarine, then wiped a bead of juice from his chin with the back of his hand.

"Fuck you, Blaise," said Pansy from the closet.

"You keep saying that, and I’m starting to think that you mean it,” he said, sliding onto the seat cushion. He tossed the nectarine pit into the air, pulled out his wand and shot a rapid “_ Evanesco _,” at it before it hit the floor. “I'd be happy to oblige, as I remain as much at your service in that area as I have always hoped to be, but Daphne and I are in the preliminary stages of discussing getting back together, and she would have my bollocks."

“And she’s _ not _ going to have your bollocks when you have a grotty shag with Melody over the back of a bench in the tack room tonight? You’re going to come back smelling of horses, and it will be because of an entirely different sort of ride.”

Blaise shuddered.

“I am not going to shag Melody today. I’ve sworn against it. My honor forbids it.”

“Your honor is the lowest possible stake I can think of. I’d sooner bet enough Galleons that I’d notice them missing against Ron Weasley giving us the play by play of his top ten greatest professional Quidditch victories for us over dinner, than a Sickle against you putting your dick in a willing witch.”

“I have _ standards _, I’ll have you know,” he protested, pulling on a pair of dress socks.

“Mmm. Write me a list of them sometime, you’ve piqued my curiosity. Ah! Thank _ gods _, there it is.” She emerged from the closet carrying a massive leather box.

She set the box down at the table, pulled open the lid, and drew out an enormous and indescribably hideous porcelain and bronze vase.

“What the _ blazes _ is that cursed object? Are we still turning up Horcruxes at this late hour?” Blaise remarked, staring at it, repulsed.

“It’s the French vase,” said Pansy. “A prized Malfoy heirloom, and one whose display is so critical to Narcissa’s sense of having properly married off her only son and heir that she felt the need to dispatch me, specifically, to locate it and place it on the gift table. This, despite the fact that I have the management of the nuptial costumes of the entire wedding party and members of the immediate family, the task of keeping an _ extremely _ anxious bride with nothing available to micromanage from bringing up bleu cheese dressing all over the front of her immaculate and discreetly exorbitant gown, and for some reason the bloody wine list.”

“You’re tops on wine, Pans,” said Blaise.

“Undoubtedly,” said Pansy, “and despite such a valuable skill set, here we find me rifling through the fourth best guest room for the antique flower pot.”

Blaise looked the vase over.

It was titanic in stature, its gleaming porcelain surface painted with an oval portrait of a reposing man and woman, both nude, draped in and reclining on inexplicable swathes of jewel-toned fabric; there were massive, arbitrary bolts of it rolling willy-nilly about the back _ and _ foregrounds. The body of the vase was painted a vivid spearmint green, and its base and handles were constructed of gilt brass, the handles sculpted in the shape of a pair of lurid goats who appeared to be lustily consuming long strings of grapes, still on the vine. In the far left corner of the tableau, untouched by either figure, there was a cryptic tambourine. 

Blaise narrowed his eyes and peered closely.

“Is she...on his…?”

Pansy looked at the vase and shrugged.

“Is that even legal? To do on a vase?” he asked.

“It’s French,” she concluded, irritatedly.

“Naturally. Anyway, this _ never _is the fourth best guest room,” Blaise insisted.

“Mmm. Well, I’ll be off with the vessel,” she said, hoisting the monstrosity and turning to leave.

“You seem stressed,” called Blaise after her.

“I hadn’t noticed,” said Pansy over her shoulder, “with all the running around to fetch the vulgar porcelain.”

“I’m getting you shagged tonight,” he said. “And if I’ve ever learned anything whatsoever, it’s how to get shagged. I don’t even need that vase to show me.”

Pansy turned back and looked at him stolidly.

“You’re an _ idiot _,” she concluded, then added, “and you might want to see to Draco. He’s so wound up he’s started drinking Firewhiskey neat out of a highball glass, and I’m not convinced he’s not still pissed from your wretched stag night. If he's waiting at the top of that aisle rat-arsed, you’ll be done with both your Melody and your Daphne problems, because Hermione and Narcissa are going to have you gelded.”

“Shite, shite, shite,” muttered Blaise as he dashed across the room to grab his shoes.

Pansy hadn’t made it as far as the foyer when she was accosted by a massive silver-mist horse.

“_ The dress is pinching at the middle. Again. Sorry, _” it said in Ginny Weasley-Potter’s voice.

Pansy turned heel in the middle of the hallway, passing a large portrait of a patrician woman with silver-blonde hair holding a constipated-looking, fawn-colored cat, and flicked up two fingers, palm facing in, when the woman muttered “_ Trollop, _” at her covertly as she passed. At the end of the hallway, she passed through an archway and wound her way up a staircase to the second story and the bedroom occupied by Harry and Ginny.

“It’s out of control, I’m _ so _ sorry,” fretted Ginny when Pansy entered the room.

Pansy set down the vase on the seat of a chair near the door, and moved to inspect Ginny in her bridesmaid’s dress.

“Merlin, you’re not joking. Should we be alarmed? If we _ shouldn’t _ be alarmed, I’m never doing this,” said Pansy, pulling her wand from her pocket and beginning to adjust the fabric covering Ginny’s midsection. “Are you proud, Potter? You’ve made your wife blow up like a decomposing sea mammal.”

“Never more so,” sighed Harry.

Pansy glanced over at him, sitting on a chair next to the window with his stubbled chin in his hand, looking out over the hubbub going on across the grounds below.

“You look exhausted,” noted Pansy. “Scratch that, you look like _ absolute _ shit.”

“Not getting much sleep,” said Harry with a yawn.

“I thought it was your wife who ought to be suffering under these conditions,” said Pansy. “Is she kicking you in all your tender places in your sleep so you can experience the primal power of growing a human life together?”

Harry looked at her, completely dazed, then stood up and walked across the room, picked up a hair brush from the bureau, put it down, and picked it up again.

“It’s because we’re having sex. A lot,” said Ginny. “Oh, gods, that’s loads better,” she added when her dress was sitting easily on her midsection and hips.

“Is that why you’re becoming enormous? Can a man make you _ more _ pregnant after he’s done it the first time?” Pansy said archly.

“I _ cannot _ get enough,” hissed Ginny. “It’s all I can think about. He actually asked me if I wanted to open up our marriage the other night. I've made him _ cry _. And not in the good way.”

Before Pansy could excuse herself from the intimate details of Harry Potter and Ginny once-Weasley’s boudoir, a dour-looking House-elf in a tuxedo that fit like a baggy tracksuit Apparated into the room.

“Is Miss ready to approve the champagne for the cocktail hour?” he asked, eyeing Ginny warily as she plumped up her burgeoning cleavage in the mirror.

“Merlin’s taint, I thought we’d done that. Alright, I’ll be down in a moment, I just need to deliver the naughty pottery,” she said, before turning to find that both the French vase and Harry Potter were missing.

She quickly popped into the kitchen to taste the champagne, gave the House-elves the go-ahead to assemble the champagne cocktails ten minutes before the ceremony ended, and Apparated into the foyer to begin her search for the Boy Who Lived Only to Be Put Into a Coma by His Wife.

He wasn’t in the library, nor was he in the drawing room, billiards room, either of the walk-in coat closets adjacent to the foyer, nor the storage cubby under the stairs, which Pansy was genuinely hoping against being the winning ticket.

Narcissa was giving last-minute instructions to a fleet of House-elves about the timing of floating candles, and hadn’t seen Harry, nor had Hermione’s parents, sitting somewhat dazed themselves on a bench in the front garden.

It wasn’t until she rounded the side of the house and headed into the rose garden, where the blooms were open, thick and fragrant on every bush, that she heard someone call her name.

“Heya, Pansy?”

She turned around, and behind her, clutching the ghastly crockery by both goats, was Neville.

It was heading into the fullness of the afternoon on a cloudless day in June, and the sunlight was mild and warm as a maternal kiss.

He was slightly more tanned than he’d been when she’d last seen him over a month before, and he looked freshly scrubbed, wearing a three piece suit in a summer grey, well cut, but just a hair’s breadth too short at the jacket sleeves and the hem of his trousers, as though it had been bought when he was nearly but not entirely done growing. He had on a pressed white shirt with a dark tie, and there was a small boutonniere pinned to the lapel of his jacket.

His hair still fell in loose curls toward his eyes, but it was now quite short at the back.

He’d had it cut, and the fact that she didn’t know _ when _ made her feel like her insides were a bruise she couldn't stop pressing with a curious thumb. 

“I’ve been told that you’re looking for this,” he said, and gestured at her with the French vase.

Pansy crossed the length of the gravel walk feeling self-conscious, which she as a rule did not feel under any circumstances, and stopped two arms' lengths away from him.

“Where did you find it?” she asked. “And have you located Potter as well? I think he was removing this from the room before his wife got any ideas.”

Neville looked at her questioningly, but before he could examine the vase more closely, she reached out a hand, and he gave it to her.

“Harry was sleeping curled up around it underneath a bench in the demonstration organic herb garden,” said Neville. “He looked very peaceful.”

“Beyond a doubt,” said Pansy, clutching her arms around the vase and hoping she was shielding the relevant parts of the tableau. “You’re here rather early,” she continued. Her body repositioned itself two steps closer to him.

“Draco owled me this morning to check on the soundness of a tree overhanging the gazebo before the ceremony starts,” he explained, pulling at the cuff of his jacket as though he could bring it down the quarter of an inch it needed with his fingers. “I think he’s a bit anxious, honestly. But I've been doing consulting work on sustainability for the estate for a few months now, as well. Hermione asked me just after she moved in. These old properties sometimes still run on spell-intensive agricultural practices, some of which can be quite effective in mitigating soil fertility loss, but there's always new…" he rambled, running his hand over the shorn hair at the back of his head, and then as his eyes landed on the vase, he stopped talking.

Pansy looked down, and discovered that she was perfectly framing the more actively engaged parts of the couple in the triangle formed between her thumbs and index fingers.

“Well. They’re...not bound by conventions, eh?” he said, and his cheeks turned precisely the color of the exemplary classic English roses blooming in profusion on the nearest bush. “I don’t wonder that Potter was trying to bury it under the lavender hedge.”

“It’s French,” Pansy said, and she found she’d swayed another step and a half closer to him.

He looked down at her for a long moment.

“You look really beautiful,” he finally said. “I’ve always liked that color on you very much.”

“Thanks.” She looked at his boutonniere, a deep dust-pink rose with a spray of tiny pale pink forget-me-nots and sprigs of greenery. “We match,” she said, glancing between it and her dress.

“Oh. Well. They gave me one, for seeing about the tree,” he replied.

“A reward for your bravery,” she quipped.

He slipped his hands in his pockets, and looked down to watch his shoe shift against the gravel.

“You’ve had your hair cut,” she said quietly, and he looked up at her.

“Yeah. For the wedding."

Before she allowed herself to think it through, she reached up to push her fingers through the cropped hair at the nape of his neck. “It’s so short at the back.”

He lifted his hand and laid it over hers, holding it still. “Please, don’t. I'm...” He cut himself off, swallowed, and looked down again.

_ You’re here with someone else _, Pansy thought. It felt as though her stomach made a kind of revolving descent, and she wanted to go curl up under a bench in the herb garden with the French vase.

“My apologies,” she said in her most well-bred tone, pulling her hand away. “Well, I need to see this bit of recherché pornography to the gift table, and hope that any parents have the good sense to shield their children’s eyes,” she said, and moved around him toward the house.

All she heard as she walked away from him were her shoes crunching on the gravel and the whining of the peacocks on the south lawn.

“Cover for me at the table, Pans,” said Blaise. “And take this.” He handed her a half-empty glass of champagne with a single depressed blueberry and a sprig of thyme floating next to it in mocking jocularity.

“Blaise, you are set to deliver your speech when the entree is served,” whispered Pansy sharply. “You have _ just _ shy of three courses to bring it home with Melody and get your arse to the table with your tie on straight without raising a single eyebrow.”

“She just wants to talk,” said Blaise.

“I imagine that will be difficult for her with your cock in her mouth, but I’m sure she’ll manage something,” she answered.

Blaise turned away before she'd finished talking, strolled casually to the east doorway of the ballroom with his hands in his pockets, and disappeared around the corner.

Late afternoon sun poured through the monumental arched ballroom windows and fell across the gleaming parquet floor in diffuse, drowsy bands, illuminating the agitated dust motes like sparks as the guests filed in after the ceremony and found their seats at the great round tables circling the room.

Pansy knew full well the names on the placards at her table, and after she finished helping guests find their places through a restrained smile, she carried herself resignedly to her seat near the head of the room.

“Blaise has been dispatched on an errand, but I’m sure he’ll finish up in record time,” she told Daphne as she slid primly into a gilt chair next to the wall.

“What sort of an errand?” asked Daphne, draining the last of her champagne and handing the empty glass over her shoulder to a waiting House-elf without disturbing a single one of her gleaming honey-colored hairs.

“I believe he’s been asked to take care of something from the office,” said Pansy. “He’s trying to avoid getting caught with his pants around his ankles on a project.”

“When it's business time, it's business time,” added Theo, sitting on Pansy’s right and pinching at the beak of the folded napkin swan sitting in the middle of his plate.

Harry sat to Daphne’s left, and Pansy had noted with gratitude at the ceremony that someone had managed to see to it that he got a shave. Judging by the way he was subtly vibrating, they had put him in the way of a pot of coffee as well. Ginny sat on Harry’s left, sipping at a glass of chilled water with a slice of lemon and a long curl of fresh ginger and massaging her hand over the cantaloupe she appeared to have stashed in her bodice.

She was asking Katie Bell about childbirth.

“How long does it take for everything to go back to normal? With your bits?” asked Ginny, glancing over at Harry like he was a slice of cheesecake a waiter was threatening to clear away before she’d had done with it. “I mean, how long until you can have penetrative vaginal sex again?”

Katie pinched the stem of her white wine glass between her thumb and index finger as an elf filled it with a dry, unoaked chardonnay, and gave a soft snort of amusement.

“Well, I was single at the time,” she said, “but if I’d had a partner, the midwife told me four to six weeks.”

“That’s outrageous,” erupted Ginny. “That can’t _ possibly _ be medically necessary.”

Harry downed half his wine in one swallow.

“Gods, Ginny, leave it be for half a minute. Some people are trying to enjoy the _ amuse-bouches _ over here without thinking about the condition of your lady parts,” said Ron around a mouthful of miniature savory tarte Tatin made with garlic scapes, onion and early potatoes. He sat to Katie’s left, and had somehow managed to procure a pint of lager.

“I think it’s very beautiful,” offered Luna, sitting bolt straight between Ron and Theo and biting at a fresh June strawberry from a massive handful she’d seemingly picked from the garden sometime between the end of the ceremony and now. “Bringing forth new life, from your body. Like lambing in spring, only you don’t eat the placenta.”

Ron turned white and set down the chevre-stuffed courgette flower with a delicate herbed breading and a drizzle of balsamic glaze that he’d just bit into.

Luna gave him a somnambulistic smile. "Not straight away, in any case,” she concluded, and popped a strawberry into her mouth.

“The wine’s really lovely, Pansy,” said Neville, and Pansy finally forced herself to look over to where he sat at the other side of the table. “This was a good choice.”

He was sitting to Katie Bell’s right, holding his glass of Chardonnay in one hand, and Katie’s toddler son Michael in his lap.

Pansy had carefully avoided looking at the three of them from the moment they walked to their seats for the ceremony together, because looking at them made her feel like Apparating herself back to her townhouse in London to spend some quality time being sick in the luxurious surroundings of the master bathroom.

“Thank you,” she answered. She’d have told him that she found it on a short trip through Burgundy, but he already knew that, because he’d been there. “I thought it was rather special.”

Neville nodded, and his outbreath ruffled the fine blonde hair at the crown of Michael’s head.

As the hors d’oeuvres plates disappeared from the tables and were replaced by shallow bowls of pumpkin soup, Blaise came sliding into his seat and locked his gaze on the place setting in front of him.

He looked stricken.

“That was extraordinarily fast, even for you,” remarked Pansy.

“She’s seen the vase, Pans. She thinks you can _ actually _…” he whispered, then trailed off and looked around him like he expected an Acromantula to drop down on him from the ceiling. “You have to help me. Tell her you can't do that."

"I will do no such thing," she said out of earshot of the rest of the table. "You've made your bed, now you've got to lie in it, if lying down is still possible once Melody's through with you. I'll be sure to send flowers to St. Mungo's."

“Done your bit, Blaise?” asked Daphne, sipping at her soup spoon. “The contortions that are expected of those in Draco’s employ are shocking.”

“We’re all eager to serve, in any capacity we’re reasonably able,” said Blaise, shaking his head and looking around the table for the first time. “Longbottom!” he enthused. “When I heard you were over here looking like a Daddy, this is not what I pictured."

“Both senses of the term apply,” pronounced Theo from around the rim of his glass of Sauvignon Blanc.

“Here, here!” said Ginny, slapping a hand down on Potter’s thigh.

“He looks so natural holding a child, doesn’t he?” said Katie, smiling over at him.

Pansy took an active interest in the prodigious floral display arranged in the center of the table.

“Nauseatingly so,” said Blaise. “Although I’ve never understood why a man holding a child should have women queuing up to drop their knickers. Everyone knows that children are the world’s great cockblockers.”

Harry looked up at Blaise with hope burning in his eyes.

“Neville’s been lovely,” said Katie. “It’s been hard to get out, but he’s been willing to stay in with Michael from time to time, and Michael just adores him. Plus he makes a _ brilliant _ breakfast in the morning,” she continued, grabbing Michael’s blubbery fist and giving it a gentle shake.

“You ready for another one? A little dark-haired chap?” said Ron, swiping a finger in the bottom of his soup bowl. “Will they do a refill on this if you ask? It’s _ unbelievable _. It’s a wonder the Malfoy fortune isn’t built entirely on soup. Just an entire dynasty of soup barons.”

Katie blushed. “We’ve only really just begun to have those sorts of conversations,” she said, “although we’re set to move in together when my lease expires at the end of August.”

“Excuse me,” said Pansy tersely, shooting up from her seat. She now genuinely thought she might be sick, and if that was the case, was ready to make a break for the French vase. “I’m going to check on…” she left it at that, and walked quickly out of the ballroom.

It was just past the summer solstice, and the sun would still be up until well into the dessert course, but the darker reaches of Malfoy Manor were lit with scores of fragrant white beeswax tapers that cast warm fingers of light into every brushed and polished corner of the house.

Beside a plinth supporting a bust of Lucius outside the door to the study in the west wing, Pansy managed to find a shadow to curl up in. She slid down the wall, pulled her knees up to her chin, and pressed the heels of her palms against her eyes.

She could hear the distant clink of cutlery and glasses, and the rushing footsteps of the House-elves as they worked furiously to keep the dinner humming along, and tried very hard to not think about tiny little boys with blonde hair and their Mummies and their Mummies’ special friends that stayed over sometimes and made the breakfast.

The image came, unbidden, of Neville standing at the stove, with those criminally awful Gryffindor pajama bottoms slung around his hips, hair short at the back and a catastrophic mess of curls at the front, smiling over his shoulder at Katie Bell, sitting at the breakfast table, wearing one of Neville’s white tee shirts. Pansy sucked in her breath so hard she could hear it reverberate around the empty hall.

“I had an entire speech prepared for this,” she heard someone say, “and I honestly believed I was never going to need it.”

Pansy looked up, blinking wetly.

Narcissa was approaching from a door leading out onto a balcony overlooking the topiary gardens on the north lawn, tugging lightly at the front of her gown. She crossed the hallway and, to Pansy’s surprise, came down to the floor and sat, with her skirt spread demurely over her legs and her ankles curled elegantly to one side.

Pansy looked at her, and knew that her face was an open book. Narcissa took a long moment to read it.

“Darling,” she said, finally, and pressed a cool hand against Pansy’s cheek. “Thank you. For everything you’ve done.”

“It was only a wine list,” said Pansy, pulling at the hem of her dress. “And you know that I would do anything at all for Draco. Anything. All he has to do is ask.”

“I do know,” Narcissa said. “And we both know it’s been rather more than a wine list.” The intensity of her gaze told Pansy that she meant more even than wedding clothes, table placards, and the shuttling about of adults-only vases.

“I never...apologized...for my son’s behavior,” she continued, her tone shifting to something quiet and open that Pansy wasn’t familiar with. “I can’t know the extent of what happened between you, but it can’t have been easy for you. To have, I’m quite sure, hoped…to have been lead to _ believe _ that...”

Pansy put a hand on Narcissa’s arm to stop her.

“I forgave Draco for all of that a _ very _ long time ago,” said Pansy. “And I am genuinely delighted to see him happy today.”

Narcissa looked deeply relieved, then a shadow of perplexion crossed her perfectly made-up brow, before she tilted her head in curiosity.

“You know…” she began, as though trying out a new idea. “I have an old friend, someone from Lucius’ and my days at Hogwarts, who has made a very respectable fortune for himself,” she said, “on racing brooms. He chooses to spend that wealth on worthy causes. He’s inordinately fond of nature, a penitent inclination, I suspect, stemming from the necessity of chopping down trees in order to make the things that make him rich. He gives out a very great deal of grant money to support the work of research scientists and conservationists.”

Pansy twisted her fingers hard in her hem.

“One of his pet favorites is young Neville Longbottom, of all people, the war hero. He apparently does some kind of work with trees. Hermione has, I think, brought him round the Manor on similar lines. I believe you were at Hogwarts together?”

Pansy nodded, her mouth set in a firm line.

“I understand Neville is sent all over the world.” As Narcissa spoke, she continued to scan her eyes over Pansy’s face, studying, categorizing, carefully turning over the pieces of a puzzle.

“I had lunch with this friend, about two months ago now, and he mentioned in passing that he’d seen Mr. Longbottom, a few weeks before, by chance, in Paris, walking along the Canal Saint-Martin.”

Pansy’s breath completely stilled.

“He was with a witch, very young, very beautiful. He said they looked ‘terribly in love’. Those are his words, not mine. And that they made him miss being young himself. I will admit I had wondered, from what he described...” Narcissa paused, seemed to take in Pansy’s hair and face, then began again on a new track.

“You know, I was enormously proud to be sorted into Slytherin,” she said. “So many advantages. So much power. But I wonder now,” she said, “as I’ve grown older, stepping outside on occasion with what I refuse to accept as hot flashes just yet,” she smiled ruefully, “whether there isn’t something to that famous Gryffindor bravery. To that...forthrightness that they have. I wonder,” she looked at a candle as it briefly guttered in the draft from a distant door, “if they don’t gain something that we miss with all of the risks that they seem to find so easy to take.”

Narcissa smoothed a hand over her perfectly swept blonde hair, laced with threads of silver as she moved through middle age.

“Now,” she said, rising with impossible grace, “I believe they’re starting in on the appetizer course, and if I’m not mistaken, you’ve chosen a gorgeous Beaujolais.”

Pansy took the hand that Narcissa extended to her, grasping it gently, fingers pointed down, and accepted her help to stand.

“A _ shag _,” said Blaise too loudly. “There are dozens of eligible wizards in the room, Pans, and I swear I will find the one to turn that frown upside down.”

“I despise every word that you just said, especially the last few, and also _ you _ right this moment, beyond anything,” said Pansy, stabbing into a stack of endive and butter lettuce.

“I could use a shag,” said Ron, pushing bits of frisee off to the side of his plate. “Not with you, Parkinson, no offense.”

Pansy stared at him. “Absolutely none taken whatsoever,” she said flatly.

"Hullo, what’s this in the dressing?” asked Blaise. “Is that dirt, or a mustard seed? A dirty mustard seed?”

“It’s full of beautiful secrets,” said Luna.

“The elves _ literally _ wash every leaf, Blaise, three times, in three different water temperatures, for this salad. It’s massaged like a rich, lonely housewife. It’s a very nice, _ very _ clean salad,” said Pansy. “And mind yourself with the rosé, are you quite sure you’re going to be able to give your speech without adding any ornamentation? There’s a _ script _ , which we’ve _ practised _. And I’ll remind you that Draco’s always armed.”

“I think I could take him,” said Blaise. “If I had to.”

Pansy took his glass, moved it to the opposite side of her plate, and signaled to a House-elf for a vial of sobriety potion.

“Have you been single for very long, Pansy?” asked Katie Bell.

Neville was walking around the table in circles after Michael, who was picking up and inspecting every fallen crumb and iota from the floor, and preventing him from putting them in his mouth.

"She’s been _ violently _ single for well over a year,” said Theo.

Pansy felt her skin flush.

Neville sat back down, pulled Michael into his lap, pulled a small packet of crackers out of his vest pocket and spread five of them out on his plate. Michael fisted each one in turn and coolly eyed the rest of the table as he shoved them possessively into his mouth.

Pansy blushed harder, crossed her legs, and began to bounce the heel of her nude pump against her foot. She could feel Neville watching her, and she refused to look back.

“I was single for quite a long time myself,” said Katie. “I wasn't in a rush in any case, but it’s a bit tricky when you have a child.”

“Mmm,” said Pansy, kicking her heel faster.

“I’m lucky that Oliver was open to the idea of seeing someone with an infant,” Katie continued. “But I suppose we’d already known one another for ages.”

Pansy stopped moving.

“Oliver?” she said.

“Mmm hmm,” answered Katie, tipping back the last swallow of her rosé.

“Oliver _ Wood _,” said Pansy. She looked back and forth between Neville and Katie. Michael had finished his crackers, and moved on to sucking on the middle two fingers of his right hand.

Neville sat completely frozen, and was openly staring at Pansy.

“Your boyfriend is Oliver _ Wood _,” repeated Pansy slowly. Her skin prickled.

“Oh, yes. I’m sorry, I suppose you weren't seated yet when we did the catching up,” said Katie. “We’ve been together since Michael was six months old.”

“But you’re here with Neville,” said Pansy.

“Yes, we were both invited separately, but Oliver’s playing a match this afternoon, so Neville offered to come with me and lend a hand with Michael. Toddlers are an absolute nightmare at things like this, but Hermione insisted I bring him. I think my being pregnant had some kind of catalyzing effect for her getting together with Draco. And I wonder if she’s feeling a little broody.”

Pansy finally turned to Neville, who looked like he'd been petrified.

“Oliver Wood is your flatmate,” she said.

“He is,” answered Neville.

“I knew that,” she continued.

“You did,” he said.

Pansy looked back at Katie.

Katie Bell, the girlfriend of Oliver Wood, Neville Longbottom’s flatmate.

“So Neville doesn’t fuck you, then make the breakfast in the morning,” said Pansy.

Ron sprayed a mouthful of lager onto his discarded nest of frisee.

Michael pulled his wet fingers from his mouth with a pop, said "_ Fuck _you," with perfect articulation, then jammed them back in his mouth again.

“Oh, gods!” laughed Katie. “What on _ Earth _ gave you that idea? Merlin, Pansy, what a thing to say. Neville’s clearly been seeing _ someone _ , or _ someones _ , we’re not sure. He comes back from all of his trips positively _ glowing _ , at least until recently, but he’s never actually spoken about anyone,” she said. “He does watch Michael for us now and again, though, and he makes a _ fantastic _breakfast.”

“You’ve been sitting there thinking that this whole time?” Neville asked Pansy. He looked totally dumbstruck.

Pansy said nothing. She felt hot all over, and a little dizzy. She picked up her water glass, drained it entirely, and watched it magically refill.

“Find a man who will cook you breakfast the morning after, and lock it down. I can’t honestly say that I blame you for avoiding all that, though, Pans,” said Blaise, now resoundingly in his cups. “I'd be put off relationships as well if my last two had spent every minute of their time in bed with me pretending I was another person. I’m frankly shocked that Draco never came right out and asked you to Polyjuice yourself.”

Pansy flashed him a curdling glare, and slammed the vial of sobriety potion down in front of him.

“That’s not on, Blaise,” said Neville firmly.

“You’re right, valiant Longbottom,” said Blaise, waving his hands in defeat. “Too far. I apologize.” He downed the potion. “But, you’ve been absolutely miserable for the last month, Pans. I’d just like you to find the bloke out there that would love nothing better than an acerbic brunette with an adorable little bum and a lovely scant B cup, if my memory from Saint-Tropez in the summer of ‘96 serves.”

“They’re understated and exquisite,” said Theo. “I certainly never imagined a different set.”

“Do you know anyone who’d be a good fit for our Pans, Longbottom?” asked Blaise. “He’d need to enjoy the sensation of having his balls wither up under her crushing gaze, but I personally quite understand the appeal there. I’d pay for it if she’d let me, I'm not joking in the slightest.”

“Pansy is more than capable of figuring out what she wants for herself, and when she wants it,” said Neville drily. “Ron, I see the team’s done well this season, how’s the elbow holding up?”

Michael squealed and reached his plush arms toward his mother, and Neville helped him cross over into her lap.

“I don’t know why you keep trying with her, Blaise, she seems perfectly content to be single,” interjected Daphne. “Not everyone feels the need to fill up every empty hole in their life.”

“_ I _ do,” said Ginny, licking vinaigrette from the tines of her fork.

“I think Pansy made her position on hook ups rather clear with the incident at that bar in Mayfair last autumn,” added Theo. “Very nearly had MLE brought in over it, if I recall.”

“I put it back,” said Pansy crisply. 

“Sure, but a bloke’s going to miss that, even for a moment,” said Blaise.

“What was that spell you finally came up with, that you think none of us knows about?” asked Theo. “Keeps fellows three and a half feet away at all times when you’re at a party? I like watching that one working, it’s such an elegant little bit of magic. They look so confused when they just sort of...flow around you.”

Pansy wanted to toss her water in Theo and Blaise’s faces, let it refill, and do it again. Even better if they got bits of lemon wedge straight in the eye.

Neville looked between Pansy, Theo, and Blaise with his eyes slightly narrowed, like he was following a complicated Quidditch play.

“How long has Pansy been...hostile...to the idea of blokes asking her out?” he asked.

“Oh, ever so long,” said Theo. “I think we really noticed it in the middle of last spring, but it had probably been going on for a bit by then. I thought for a while things between us, or gods forbid what went on with Draco, had spoilt relationships for her, but I think she’s just focusing on work, and sorting things out personally. Right, Pans?”

Pansy was so livid she couldn’t speak.

“And then she’s been in such a rush to get away almost every weekend," Theo went on. "Spending time exploring herself, traveling, which, good for you, darling. Figure out what you want for _ you _.”

Luna turned to Pansy. “Find the self, explore it, and then let it go,” she said, smiling. “The salad was grand. I liked the dirty bits.”

"It could've done with a bit less of the moss," said Ron.

As the salad plates disappeared, Neville sloshed the last mouthful of rosé around his glass, then set it down. Then he picked it up, drank it, and set his glass down again. Then he picked up his empty glass, and set it back down. Then he sat and did nothing at all.

“Heya, Pansy?” he said, finally.

“What,” she answered.

“I’m in love with you.” 

The table went quiet.

“That’s absurd,” she spat.

She could look at nothing except her shoe, slapping against her heel again.

After a beat, he continued.

“Pans?”

“_What _, Neville?”

“Are you in love with me?”

Pansy stood up suddenly from the table and threw her balled-up napkin into the middle of her plate.

“Of _ course _ I am,” she shouted, and stomped the twenty paces to the nearest doorway.

It was another thirty paces to the closest door that exited to the grounds, but she didn’t count the number of steps she ran to get to the demonstration organic herb garden before he caught up with her.

The lavender hedge was filled with heliotrope blooms, stalks bending under the weight of coin-sized bumblebees, their furred black and yellow bodies shrouded in veils of pollen. To the west, the sun rolled slowly down the lid of the blue sky toward the rim of the horizon.

“Pansy, wait, please,” he said.

She slowed, and stopped.

“Why are you running?” he asked. “There’s no reason to, is there?”

She turned around and glared at him.

He’d removed his jacket at the dinner table, and stood in his vest and shirtsleeves. His hair was mussed, and the jog into the garden had brought color into his cheeks.

“Pans,” he said, and then stopped. He looked away from her, considering, and then turned back.

“What do you want?” he asked, and the way he said it was soft and full of a patient, waiting sort of _ love _, like a door that would always be held open to a room she’d never wanted to leave to begin with.

She could feel her pulse thrumming in her ears.

“I want to keep you,” she bit out, then clamped her mouth down tight. 

“Then keep me,” he answered, and she saw that he was confused, like two people holding on to one another was the simplest thing in the world.

She could only stare at him, and fight against the unfamiliar way her mouth pulled down at the corners and trembled. The hard stone was back in her throat, and she swallowed around it. 

"I’ve been yours for ages,” he said, tired and exasperated and easy as anything.

“Then why didn’t you _ say _?” she asked, her voice working hard to hold itself together.

"I thought you didn't want me to,” he answered, and there was an amused kind of incredulity pinned to it, like they’d both made themselves ridiculous and he couldn’t entirely stop himself from laughing at them. “I'd have said straight away if I'd known it was alright."

“When? When would you have said?” she asked.

“Tokyo,” he said. “Milan. Gods, Pansy, I touched you and it was over for me. There hasn’t been anyone else.”

She made a cursory swipe of her hand beneath both eyes.

"Don't cry, Pans. It's simple enough to fix this."

“I’m not crying. That’s not something that I _ do_,” she answered.

“Alright,” he nodded, and his face was so _ fucking _ fond.

“I’d like it very much if I could touch you,” he said. “Can I come over there?”

She nodded, and as he came close enough to pull her against him, she breathed for the first time in weeks.

He brought his face to hers, his lips leaving a string of benedictions from the tops of her cheeks to the line of her jaw, and when his mouth finally moved against hers, he tasted like wine and salt.

“Pansy Parkinson,” he said softly.

“Neville Longbottom,” she answered.

“I like your dress,” he whispered, and she smiled against his mouth.

Fuck, fucking, _ fucked _, and he was fucked, too, so it was alright, all of it, always.

Her hands scrambled through his hair, and she was ambushed by her own desire. On the other side of a daft, cowardly, broken, unbroken heart, she needed to touch him, and needed him to touch her, everywhere, immediately.

“I want you,” she said, licking at him, and there was a new velocity to both of their movements.

“Where,” he breathed, “do you want to go?”

She drew a blank.

“_ Not here _,” she said, and after considering for half a second, he Apparated them both.

It was dark, and smelled of camphor and Bertie Bott’s beans.

“Shite,” muttered Neville. She felt him pull his wand from his pocket and flick it into the darkness, and a lamp flared into life on a little desk by a curtained window.

Pansy’s mouth was immediately on his again, and she wanted skin, all of it, under her hands and against her body.

She pulled at his tie until it hung loose, and began to unbutton his vest.

“Off, get it _ off _,” she ordered, and for a moment he helped her, but then he suddenly changed his mind, and stilled her hands in his.

“The reception, Pans,” he said, brushing their knuckles against his lips, “they’ll be so disappointed if we miss it all. We don't have a lot of time.”

She groaned in frustration, but grumbled “Fine,” and moved to unbuckle his belt instead.

While her hands fumbled with the leather, he turned them around and backed her onto the surface of a spool-turned, four-poster single bed, and brought the length of his body to cover hers.

“Gods, I missed you,” he whispered against her mouth.

“I missed you, too,” she said, “so _ fucking _ much,” and his hips jerked.

She wrapped her legs around his waist, and he reached back and slid one hand from her ankle, up her calf, over her knee, up her thigh, over her hip, then he stopped everything, completely, and sat up to look at her.

“Pansy,” he said, urgently.  
“What?”

“You’re not wearing any knickers.”

“No,” she said, and sat up to lick at his throat, because she wanted him to start, not stop.

“Why aren’t you wearing any knickers.”

“I knew,” she said, sliding her tongue over the dip at the base of his throat, “that I was going to see you.” She pulled the top button of his trousers free. “And I thought,” she continued, popping the next button, “that if there was even a _ chance _,” the third button opened, “I’d like,” she finished the last one, “to be ready.”

“_ Fuck _,” he said, and dropped his forehead down to rest against her sternum.

“You alright, Neville?”

“No," he replied. "But I will be in a moment.”

She reached into his trunks and wrapped her hand around him.

“_ Fuck! _” he shouted, but when she began to pull firmly at him, he went silent, and could do nothing but breathe hard into her neck.

As she stroked him, he began to rock his hips into her hand, and she felt her arm scratch against the red crocheted afghan with thin yellow chevron stripes covering the bed. She pulled the lobe of his ear between her lips, and the defeated moan he sent into the skin at the side of her throat made her smile.

There was a Gryffindor pennant hanging on the wall behind the bed, and what looked like a series of highly detailed herbology prints.

“Neville?”

‘Yeah, Pans?” he breathed hard on a firm upstroke.

“Are we in your bedroom?”

He didn’t answer for a moment, then affirmed, “Yeah. Sort of.”

He pulled out of her hand, pushed his trousers and trunks down his hips, and then rolled onto his back and pulled her over to straddle his hips.

“This is my old room,” he breathed. “At my Gran’s house.”

Pansy stared at him.

“You brought me to your Gran’s house,” she said.

He shifted down to line himself up with her, lifted her up by the hip, then pushed the tip of himself inside.

“Oliver’s going to be coming back to our flat soon,” he panted as she took over, lowering herself onto him, “and I panicked. This was the first place I thought of that we could be alone. Gran’s in Brighton at her sister’s..._ fuck, fuck, FUCK _ …slow down, _ why _ are you so wet?”

“I haven’t been with you in over a month,” she said, shuddering as she reached the bottom. “I can’t do any of the right things by myself.”

She began to roll her hips, and he grabbed her firmly to make her sit still.

“Stop, STOP, please stop, I’m not going to last. This is hitting a lot of really weird buttons for me that I didn’t know I had.”

He closed his eyes and breathed very slowly.

“I’ve never had sex in here,” he continued, “but I _ thought _ about it in here. A lot.”

Pansy smiled so hard it hurt.

“Can I go down on you?” he asked.

“No,” she answered sharply. “I want you inside me when I come.”

“Gods, Pans,” he groaned. “I don’t know. I’ll do my best. What do you need?”

“Just you,” she breathed, falling forward to kiss him.

They found a rhythm that made her chest flush pink and her head fall back. 

“Neville?” she said after a while.

“Yeah?”

"Come here."

He sat up, wrapped both arms around her waist and pressed his chest to hers.

She pushed her fingers through the freshly cut hair at the back of his head, and lowered her mouth to his ear.

“I’m about to come,” she whispered, “while riding your cock,” her breath came fast, “on your fucking crocheted Gryffindor bedspread.”

“Oh, Pansy,” he sighed, and when she locked her ankles together against his back and shook, all he could do is watch her.

As she came down, rolling her hips against him slowly, she circled her arms around his head, pulled his mouth up to hers, and kissed him.

“I love you,” she whispered.

He came, instantly, and bit her shoulder so hard it left a bruise.

When they walked back into the ballroom at Malfoy Manor, holding hands, Neville’s tie still hanging loose from his shirt collar, Blaise was standing at the head of the room, just finishing up his speech.

“...and I wish them both the greatest happiness.” He lifted his glass to Draco and Hermione, sitting at their table at the head of the room.

This was the end of his speech, which he had written and rehearsed, and been thoroughly warned against embellishing by Pansy at the end of one of her most withering glares, which had made him smile in a way that made her very angry, which had made her tell him she was going to tell Daphne to show up at the office right on time for his 10:15 dictation with Melody, which had made him apologize.

Despite the risks to himself, he continued his speech.

“And let us all remember, that as tempting as some ideas may be to us,” he continued, “as alluring as the siren call of some thoughts from other places, and other times, that arrive to us upon strange vessels may be, that not everything we think we may want in this life makes sense. Or is safe. Or is even possible.”

Harry looked up at him from his seat at the table, nodding like an acolyte.

“If we can keep our heads, and allow the men in our lives the room to breathe,” he was going for broke, “we can all go home tonight feeling like a tomorrow is possible. Thank you.”

Pansy glared, until Neville squeezed her hand and shrugged.

“What’s for dessert?” he asked.

At 11 p.m., The orchestra had played its way through the stodgy traditional Wizarding dances and cleared the floor for a five-piece rock band that played whatever anybody asked them to, Wizarding or Muggle or anything in between.

“_ Should I stay, or should I go now? _ ” shouted Neville, flailing about on the parquet. Pansy jumped up, wrapped her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist, and said, “Stay, stay!” and then she kissed him, and kissed him, and _ kissed _ him.

At 12:30 a.m., Pansy sat in an empty bathtub belonging to the third best guest room with Hermione, Ginny, and Luna, passing around a bottle of champagne to everyone but Ginny.

“Well done, Hermione,” said Ginny.

“Thank you,” said Hermione. “And thank you for never complaining about a dress you’ll never wear again.”

“Oh, she’ll wear it again,” said Pansy.

“Yes, I will,” said Ginny.

Hermione looked at them both inquiringly.

“It’s pajamas,” said Pansy.

“What do you mean,” asked Hermione.

“Transfigured pajamas,” said Ginny. “A very nice, very comfortable, very expensive night dress.”

Pansy pulled her wand from her pocket and showed her.

“You’re a genius, Pansy,” said Hermione.

“Thank you,” said Pansy.

“I like to let it all _breathe_,” said Luna cryptically, swigging from the bottle.

At 2 a.m., Pansy was curled up into Neville’s side, draped in his suit jacket, on a bench overlooking the lawn sloping down to the lake and the gazebo, still drenched in flowers and now lit with countless floating candles, when there was the sound of an argument, shouting, something like falling boxes and glass breaking, and then Harry Potter was running across the lawn as fast as Pansy had ever seen a human being run, gripping the French vase by its handles. Behind him streamed Draco, red in the face, tie undone, and wand out, and behind him was Blaise, clutching at Draco’s wand arm and screaming his encouragement to Harry.

“Go, Potter! Go! _ Go! _ To the lake! _ To the lake! _”

Pansy turned into Neville’s side, pulled her arms tightly around him, closed her eyes, and sighed contentedly. He drew his fingers through the back of her hair, and leaned down to kiss the top of her head.

She heard a distant splash.

“Thank gods,” said Narcissa, leaning against the open door to the ballroom and sipping from a glass of Sauternais. “I’ve been trying to get rid of that abomination for years.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can be found on [Tumblr](https://pacific-rimbaud.tumblr.com/).


	5. Epilogue

September, Paris

“Neville. Come out, I need to speak with you.”

Neville pulled his head out from underneath his white tee shirt, the only thing whatsoever Pansy was wearing.

“Mm hm?” he asked, wrapping his mouth around her nipple again, through the fabric.

“Did you order the Portkey to New Orleans?”

“Mm hm.”

“Thank you.”

“Of course.”

“I’m still worried about the plants.”

“Don’t be. I’ve only brought the ones that can’t strangle you in your sleep. I gave the others to George Weasley.”

“If you say so...o_h_, that feels nice.”

“I’ll keep doing it, then.”

“Thank you for sorting out your boxes straight away.”

“My pleasure.”

“Neville?”

“Hmm.”

“What do you want?”

“I’d like to keep doing this, if you like it.”

“I do.”

“Then I shall.”

They were both quiet for a long moment.

“What do _ you _ want, Pans?”

“I want you to kiss me." 

He brought his mouth down to hers, and kissed her.

“What else do you want?” he asked, again.

“I want to keep you.” 

And she did.

The End.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can be found on [Tumblr](https://pacific-rimbaud.tumblr.com/).
> 
> Comments and kudos are always greatly appreciated!


End file.
